I would be very interested in this except for one thing. It almost certainly requires a constant supply of power. Unless the ink will unfailingly hold a pattern after the electronics have been used to imprint them, I'd hate this. I can just imagine that I'd be in the middle of a paragraph when my batteries died and I'd be stuck on the subway with nothing to read. I mean, this is why I bring a book along in the first place - in case the batteries on my Gameboy die. I very much doubt this system is so robust that it would hold the text even without power.
Just remember, there's little that a lego creation can do when struck with a heavy, blunt object. (preferably orthogonal to the direction of construction, for maximum damage)
Isn't that the way that all robots work? A computer program providing instructions. Granted, some robots have the program internalized, but is that really all that important? I think that this is a very cool creation.
Re:Looks familiar
on
Rent-a-Game
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· Score: 2, Informative
It doesn't actually matter whether the encryption is cracked or not. That would be no worse than having one person buy the software and pirate it to everybody. I think the goal of this is to give everybody a taste of the game, in hopes that they'll enjoy it enough to pay for it, and not pirate it, even if they can. Sort of like I _could_ pirate Descent games, but I don't, because I think they're worth paying for. If I know that I'm not wasting my money, I'd be more likely to actually pay for software.
Also remember the other, very important aspect of patents. Yes, they have exclusive rights to use a particular process for the life of the patent, but they also have to release the details of that process. This means that other companies or individuals with interest and a bit of money can study the process and look for ways to improve the process (thus changing it, allowing them to patent _their_ process) and hastening the development of the technology. Granted, it doesn't always, or even usually work this way, but the idea is sound, if it were applied the way that it is supposed to be. The patent promotes further study of the technology so that cheaper GaAs semiconductors may sooner become a reality.
This is possible when there's an active power supply involved in the circuit, in addition to the signal itself. The signal enters the circuit and the presence of the power supply allows for the amplification of the resulting signal.
No that I _like_ the implications of this article, but it isn't fair either to say that people are buying CD's when all music is free. If an artist produces music and wants to sell it, they have a right to collect a payment from anybody who wants to listen to that music. Only supply and demand will determine how many copies they'll sell. Just because it's possible for somebody to steal their music and produce it for free does not make it right.
Note: I am making no claims about the quality of the music or whether I think it's worth buying or not. I'm just saying that it is not right that somebody besides the music's author should decide that said music ought to be free.
It's the second reason, I assure you. I feel just as authoritative wearing a button down shirt without a tie as I do while also wearing a noose. I'm quite certain that my supervisor will one day become fed up with me and drag me around by the necktie just to demonstrate her power over me.
It's slightly off topic, but it bears mentioning here. One of the classes taught at Case Western Reserve deals with building an artificial intelligence that is capable of collecting pastel, plastic eggs and taking them to it's nest, and rejecting black (negative points) eggs (or even better, taking them to the opponent's nest). All of the 'bots are built out of legos. It's a really neat competition too, although I suppose it's hardly of the calibre of making robots that play football. Oh, and just because it's fun to boast, some friends of mine won the competition last year and their 'bot then got a chance to compete against the reigning champion and won!
If you think about it for a minute, you'll realize that if the internet represents a market -with many producers and consumers of the same product, then the price agreed upon in this case must be zero.
Say I have a non-unique item of data (reproduction cost of zero) and I'm selling it for a dollar. Somebody else who has the same piece of information can sell it for 75 cents and take away my entire market share. Likewise, another producer can bid down the price to 50 cents and so on, because it costs them nothing to produce/sell more of that item of data. Eventually, the price must reach zero. Of course, if a piece of data is unique (this state being established by a copyright, secure encryption, or some other form of protection) then the owner has a monopoly and may actually sell the data, even though the price exceeds the marginal cost.
Because any determined person can break through encryption and any fool can violate a copyright, there really is no such thing as unique data, although often the protection is sufficient, if not perfect, to allow a producer to charge for the item of data.
Have you ever played a game called 'Dance Dance Revolution?' Sure, it's easier to use the controller, but it's a heck of a lot more fun to use the dance pad. This device could make fighting games more entertaining, especially if they're more difficult to use than a controller, because there's a good deal of satisfaction to be had in mastering an interface that isn't simple to use.
I don't object to AOL paying for advertisements. I object to them paying for space on what should be MY computer. Just as a television or a radio comes without advertisements and only receives them when I tune to a station that contains ads (most of them, admittedly) so should my computer not contain advertisements until I tune it to a station that contains ads. This means that if I don't intend to use the computer for internet surfing, then I should NEVER have to put up with an ad, because I'm tuning it only to "stations" which are within MY control and whichs hould therefore have no advertisements.
Yes, the telephone and the internet are both constructs by which immaterial concepts (sound & data) are exchanged. The similarity ends there. Why? Because sound and data are dissimilar in a crucial way.
In both cases, the product is free, or nearly so, to reproduce. A sound, once made, can be made over and over again in many ways. So it is with data. However, while sound is free to produce, data is quite expensive. In the case of research, music, essays, etc... a lot of time and effort goes into the creation of the product.
In economics, this is what is called the fixed cost - the required cost of producing even one unit of a product. The marginal cost - the cost of producing each additional unit, is the key here. It is free to reproduce data, so the marginal cost is zero. Thus, economic law dictates that the price of the product should be zero. Any economist can tell you that if the price of your good is so low that you cannot even recoup your fixed costs, then you are better off not producing. This means that the only data that belongs on the net - where the cost is necessarily zero - is that data which cost nothing to produce. This is not a perfect model (because externalities, such as philanthropy and such make it possible for "expensive" data - that which has a non-zero cost to appear on the internet.) Nonetheless, until companies understand this basic idea, they will not be able to use the internet successfully (because they will never wholly succeed in making the reproduction cost of data non-zero.)
If I understand the concept of WikiPedia and NuPedia correctly, it is that WikiPedia probably should be considered with some skepticism, for the very reasons you've suggested - that being the probability that any given article would be flawed at any given point in time.
However, as I see it, NuPedia ought to be a very reliable source of information. Because it represents only the information that has undergone the rigorous revision process of WikiPedia and the further requirements of the Chalkboard and NuPedia itself, the articles should at that point be as accurate and well-written as those of any other encyclopedia.
I agree with your assessment that the Wiki/Nu model is flawed in that there are topics which will remain without coverage because no volunteers step forward to treat them. In that respect, these open encyclopedias will remain incomplete when compared to payed-for content.
Does this necessarily mean that open encycolpedias will be inferior? Not at all! Maybe you won't be able to use NuPedia to pull up information on quantum tunneling or superstring theory, but it may prove invaluable for a student's report on evolution or on the life of Igor Stravinsky.
Or perhaps, as the author of the article predicted, it will become popular and attractive for specialists to write for such open sources of content. If that is the case, then it is altogether possible that NuPedia, or some similar model would be as complete or moreso than a commecial encyclopedia.
It also might be possible that something which would classically be considered alive (self-sustaining, consuming resources, locomotive, etc...) could exist in an equilibrium system. Just because life may cause a non-equilibrium system doesn't necessarily mean that it must.
Absolutely! Even if you think that the series itself is cliche (which, by the way, I don't. I love CB), the music is incredible. It fits the action so well and really conveys meaning, unlike so many film scores.
I agree that this device is certainly unsuitable for the action game market, but I think there are plenty of good applications for it, game-related and otherwise. I play plenty of slow-paced games when I'm not feeding my Counterstrike addiction, and I would use this device for many of 'em. It'd make SimCity easier - no more futzing with the mouse, hunting for that little icon. I can customize my interface so the things I use often are easy to find. I also play on a lot of MUSHes. I could use this to speed up cycling between them or to have out-of-game macros for setting up an @idle or @away message. Turn based games? Alpha Centauri and Civ:CTP would both be easier without the mouse. Now if it weren't for that $300 price tag, I might be more interested...ah well. The price has to come down eventually.
All right. I did get a bit extreme in saying that one should wholeheartedly support copyrights. But certainly, you have to give them some support if you enjoy quality music - you can't seek the abolition of copyrights if you're not willing to accept that doing so would destroy the music industry. However, in this case at least, I don't think the music industry has done anything in the least objectionable. CD's are not ridiculously priced, with good reason. Sure, any given publisher has a monopoly on their own CD's, so they can charge a little more and expect customers who like their product to keep paying, but there are still plenty of other publishers which are reasonably good substitutes for the products of any given publisher, so the monopoly they wield really isn't that strong. If a copyright gave a company exclusive control of 'music' or of 'piano music', then they'd be granting terrible monopolies. As it is, a copyright only grants one a monopoly over one's own music.
Just a word of refutation about the analogy you've made. Sure, Coca Cola may own the soft drink market, and it doesn't bother us, but this is the result of two fundamental differences between Microsoft and Coca Cola.
1) Soft drinks are not computers. Our society isn't grounded in soft drinks. But more and more today, things are relying upon computers. If people were, for some reason, to come to hate Coca Cola, it would not be a great burden to boycott their products or otherwise avoid them. You can't do this with computers - and with the ubiquity of MS products, this means you can't avoid Microsoft. Yes, there are exceptions, but generally, you'll find this to be true.
2) Coca Cola doesn't suck. You don't find that ever fourth bottle is not worth drinking. There is still substantial quality in the soft drink market. One may assume that because Coca Cola still faces competition from Pepsi (they haven't bought Pepsi, right?), that they must provide a quality product. MS on the other hand faces no significant competition the "easy to use Operating System" category. Therefore, it can abuse this monopoly, which is not the result of a truly original idea, nor is it a "natural" monopoly (that is to say: the operating system market will always gravitate to a single provider of operating systems). I'm not saying that Windows is utterly useless. I am, myself, a Windows User, because I've not yet found the time to properly learn Linux (I'm getting there, though.) However, Windows does not meet my expectations by a consumer, even if it fulfills some of my computing needs. For example: I expect that if I pay $200 for a piece of software that it will function properly and with reasonable stability and consistency. Windows, for the most part, fails to meet these needs. Given the lack of good alternatives however, I'm stuck. If Coca Cola were to produce a bad product, I could drink Pepsi. Were it to be the only product on the market, and it were to suck, I'd complain about it just as vehemently (well, a little less, because I can live without soft drinks) as I do about Microsoft's monopoly.
The whole difficulty in this lies with the fact that intellectual property (whether or not you agree such a thing exists is imaterial) may be reproduced at almost zero cost. In economics, a product is sold at a price equal to the cost of generating one additional unit of that product. (ie: price is decided by the point of production at which the marginal benefit of the product to the company is exactly equal to the cost of the product to the company). Since the marginal cost of producing music or any other intellectual property is effectively zero, economics dictates that music should be free.
If this were the case, nobody would produce music, because there would be no benefit to them to do so. They'd be infinitely better off being accountants or cashiers or anything other than musicians. You like music? Then you'd better support that "artificial monopoly" called a copyright for all you're worth, because without it, there is no music industry - just amateurs and enthusiests producing in their spare time. I don't know 'bout the rest of you, but paying a few bucks for a CD doesn't seem like such tyrrany in this light.
Not necessarily. If you look at genes and proteins in a slightly different light - as the functions that the genetic program can work with, then knowning how many there are and where they're located can give you some idea of what the rest of the program is working with. And since, at least for now, we can't just search for function call equivalents, counting the functions is our best alternative.
A while back my keyboard stopped working and since I couldn't go out that instant and buy a new one, I decided to try taking the old one apart to fix it. I don't know exactly what the problem was, but it turns out that I was still able to type using the sheet of sensors that lies below the keys. Essentially, it was a zero-pressure keyboard, and it was completely useless. Part of the problem was that the sensors were smaller than the keys themselves (which I'm sure wouldn't be a problem on this new device.)However, I also had all of the aforementioned problems - super-sensitive keys, inability to rest my hands, and a general dislike of the lack of tactile response. For anybody who's used to being able to type without looking at the keyboard or the screen (ie: focusing only on copy, if any is present), a device such as the FingerBoard would be more of a burden than a help.
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I would be very interested in this except for one thing. It almost certainly requires a constant supply of power. Unless the ink will unfailingly hold a pattern after the electronics have been used to imprint them, I'd hate this. I can just imagine that I'd be in the middle of a paragraph when my batteries died and I'd be stuck on the subway with nothing to read. I mean, this is why I bring a book along in the first place - in case the batteries on my Gameboy die. I very much doubt this system is so robust that it would hold the text even without power.
Just remember, there's little that a lego creation can do when struck with a heavy, blunt object. (preferably orthogonal to the direction of construction, for maximum damage)
Isn't that the way that all robots work? A computer program providing instructions. Granted, some robots have the program internalized, but is that really all that important? I think that this is a very cool creation.
It doesn't actually matter whether the encryption is cracked or not. That would be no worse than having one person buy the software and pirate it to everybody. I think the goal of this is to give everybody a taste of the game, in hopes that they'll enjoy it enough to pay for it, and not pirate it, even if they can. Sort of like I _could_ pirate Descent games, but I don't, because I think they're worth paying for. If I know that I'm not wasting my money, I'd be more likely to actually pay for software.
Also remember the other, very important aspect of patents. Yes, they have exclusive rights to use a particular process for the life of the patent, but they also have to release the details of that process. This means that other companies or individuals with interest and a bit of money can study the process and look for ways to improve the process (thus changing it, allowing them to patent _their_ process) and hastening the development of the technology. Granted, it doesn't always, or even usually work this way, but the idea is sound, if it were applied the way that it is supposed to be. The patent promotes further study of the technology so that cheaper GaAs semiconductors may sooner become a reality.
This is possible when there's an active power supply involved in the circuit, in addition to the signal itself. The signal enters the circuit and the presence of the power supply allows for the amplification of the resulting signal.
No that I _like_ the implications of this article, but it isn't fair either to say that people are buying CD's when all music is free. If an artist produces music and wants to sell it, they have a right to collect a payment from anybody who wants to listen to that music. Only supply and demand will determine how many copies they'll sell. Just because it's possible for somebody to steal their music and produce it for free does not make it right.
Note: I am making no claims about the quality of the music or whether I think it's worth buying or not. I'm just saying that it is not right that somebody besides the music's author should decide that said music ought to be free.
Nope. That's what I read, and then I read the blurb and realized I was mistaken.
It's the second reason, I assure you. I feel just as authoritative wearing a button down shirt without a tie as I do while also wearing a noose. I'm quite certain that my supervisor will one day become fed up with me and drag me around by the necktie just to demonstrate her power over me.
It's slightly off topic, but it bears mentioning here. One of the classes taught at Case Western Reserve deals with building an artificial intelligence that is capable of collecting pastel, plastic eggs and taking them to it's nest, and rejecting black (negative points) eggs (or even better, taking them to the opponent's nest). All of the 'bots are built out of legos. It's a really neat competition too, although I suppose it's hardly of the calibre of making robots that play football. Oh, and just because it's fun to boast, some friends of mine won the competition last year and their 'bot then got a chance to compete against the reigning champion and won!
If you think about it for a minute, you'll realize that if the internet represents a market -with many producers and consumers of the same product, then the price agreed upon in this case must be zero.
Say I have a non-unique item of data (reproduction cost of zero) and I'm selling it for a dollar. Somebody else who has the same piece of information can sell it for 75 cents and take away my entire market share. Likewise, another producer can bid down the price to 50 cents and so on, because it costs them nothing to produce/sell more of that item of data. Eventually, the price must reach zero. Of course, if a piece of data is unique (this state being established by a copyright, secure encryption, or some other form of protection) then the owner has a monopoly and may actually sell the data, even though the price exceeds the marginal cost.
Because any determined person can break through encryption and any fool can violate a copyright, there really is no such thing as unique data, although often the protection is sufficient, if not perfect, to allow a producer to charge for the item of data.
Have you ever played a game called 'Dance Dance Revolution?' Sure, it's easier to use the controller, but it's a heck of a lot more fun to use the dance pad. This device could make fighting games more entertaining, especially if they're more difficult to use than a controller, because there's a good deal of satisfaction to be had in mastering an interface that isn't simple to use.
I don't object to AOL paying for advertisements. I object to them paying for space on what should be MY computer. Just as a television or a radio comes without advertisements and only receives them when I tune to a station that contains ads (most of them, admittedly) so should my computer not contain advertisements until I tune it to a station that contains ads. This means that if I don't intend to use the computer for internet surfing, then I should NEVER have to put up with an ad, because I'm tuning it only to "stations" which are within MY control and whichs hould therefore have no advertisements.
Yes, the telephone and the internet are both constructs by which immaterial concepts (sound & data) are exchanged. The similarity ends there. Why? Because sound and data are dissimilar in a crucial way.
In both cases, the product is free, or nearly so, to reproduce. A sound, once made, can be made over and over again in many ways. So it is with data. However, while sound is free to produce, data is quite expensive. In the case of research, music, essays, etc... a lot of time and effort goes into the creation of the product.
In economics, this is what is called the fixed cost - the required cost of producing even one unit of a product. The marginal cost - the cost of producing each additional unit, is the key here. It is free to reproduce data, so the marginal cost is zero. Thus, economic law dictates that the price of the product should be zero. Any economist can tell you that if the price of your good is so low that you cannot even recoup your fixed costs, then you are better off not producing. This means that the only data that belongs on the net - where the cost is necessarily zero - is that data which cost nothing to produce. This is not a perfect model (because externalities, such as philanthropy and such make it possible for "expensive" data - that which has a non-zero cost to appear on the internet.) Nonetheless, until companies understand this basic idea, they will not be able to use the internet successfully (because they will never wholly succeed in making the reproduction cost of data non-zero.)
If I understand the concept of WikiPedia and NuPedia correctly, it is that WikiPedia probably should be considered with some skepticism, for the very reasons you've suggested - that being the probability that any given article would be flawed at any given point in time.
However, as I see it, NuPedia ought to be a very reliable source of information. Because it represents only the information that has undergone the rigorous revision process of WikiPedia and the further requirements of the Chalkboard and NuPedia itself, the articles should at that point be as accurate and well-written as those of any other encyclopedia.
I agree with your assessment that the Wiki/Nu model is flawed in that there are topics which will remain without coverage because no volunteers step forward to treat them. In that respect, these open encyclopedias will remain incomplete when compared to payed-for content.
Does this necessarily mean that open encycolpedias will be inferior? Not at all! Maybe you won't be able to use NuPedia to pull up information on quantum tunneling or superstring theory, but it may prove invaluable for a student's report on evolution or on the life of Igor Stravinsky.
Or perhaps, as the author of the article predicted, it will become popular and attractive for specialists to write for such open sources of content. If that is the case, then it is altogether possible that NuPedia, or some similar model would be as complete or moreso than a commecial encyclopedia.
It also might be possible that something which would classically be considered alive (self-sustaining, consuming resources, locomotive, etc...) could exist in an equilibrium system. Just because life may cause a non-equilibrium system doesn't necessarily mean that it must.
Absolutely! Even if you think that the series itself is cliche (which, by the way, I don't. I love CB), the music is incredible. It fits the action so well and really conveys meaning, unlike so many film scores.
I could be mistaken, but I'm fairly certain that Dostoyevsky has a sentence that long in Crime and Punishment. Just my two bits.
I agree that this device is certainly unsuitable for the action game market, but I think there are plenty of good applications for it, game-related and otherwise. I play plenty of slow-paced games when I'm not feeding my Counterstrike addiction, and I would use this device for many of 'em. It'd make SimCity easier - no more futzing with the mouse, hunting for that little icon. I can customize my interface so the things I use often are easy to find. I also play on a lot of MUSHes. I could use this to speed up cycling between them or to have out-of-game macros for setting up an @idle or @away message. Turn based games? Alpha Centauri and Civ:CTP would both be easier without the mouse. Now if it weren't for that $300 price tag, I might be more interested...ah well. The price has to come down eventually.
All right. I did get a bit extreme in saying that one should wholeheartedly support copyrights. But certainly, you have to give them some support if you enjoy quality music - you can't seek the abolition of copyrights if you're not willing to accept that doing so would destroy the music industry. However, in this case at least, I don't think the music industry has done anything in the least objectionable. CD's are not ridiculously priced, with good reason. Sure, any given publisher has a monopoly on their own CD's, so they can charge a little more and expect customers who like their product to keep paying, but there are still plenty of other publishers which are reasonably good substitutes for the products of any given publisher, so the monopoly they wield really isn't that strong. If a copyright gave a company exclusive control of 'music' or of 'piano music', then they'd be granting terrible monopolies. As it is, a copyright only grants one a monopoly over one's own music.
Just a word of refutation about the analogy you've made. Sure, Coca Cola may own the soft drink market, and it doesn't bother us, but this is the result of two fundamental differences between Microsoft and Coca Cola.
1) Soft drinks are not computers. Our society isn't grounded in soft drinks. But more and more today, things are relying upon computers. If people were, for some reason, to come to hate Coca Cola, it would not be a great burden to boycott their products or otherwise avoid them. You can't do this with computers - and with the ubiquity of MS products, this means you can't avoid Microsoft. Yes, there are exceptions, but generally, you'll find this to be true.
2) Coca Cola doesn't suck. You don't find that ever fourth bottle is not worth drinking. There is still substantial quality in the soft drink market. One may assume that because Coca Cola still faces competition from Pepsi (they haven't bought Pepsi, right?), that they must provide a quality product. MS on the other hand faces no significant competition the "easy to use Operating System" category. Therefore, it can abuse this monopoly, which is not the result of a truly original idea, nor is it a "natural" monopoly (that is to say: the operating system market will always gravitate to a single provider of operating systems). I'm not saying that Windows is utterly useless. I am, myself, a Windows User, because I've not yet found the time to properly learn Linux (I'm getting there, though.) However, Windows does not meet my expectations by a consumer, even if it fulfills some of my computing needs. For example: I expect that if I pay $200 for a piece of software that it will function properly and with reasonable stability and consistency. Windows, for the most part, fails to meet these needs. Given the lack of good alternatives however, I'm stuck. If Coca Cola were to produce a bad product, I could drink Pepsi. Were it to be the only product on the market, and it were to suck, I'd complain about it just as vehemently (well, a little less, because I can live without soft drinks) as I do about Microsoft's monopoly.
The whole difficulty in this lies with the fact that intellectual property (whether or not you agree such a thing exists is imaterial) may be reproduced at almost zero cost. In economics, a product is sold at a price equal to the cost of generating one additional unit of that product. (ie: price is decided by the point of production at which the marginal benefit of the product to the company is exactly equal to the cost of the product to the company). Since the marginal cost of producing music or any other intellectual property is effectively zero, economics dictates that music should be free.
If this were the case, nobody would produce music, because there would be no benefit to them to do so. They'd be infinitely better off being accountants or cashiers or anything other than musicians. You like music? Then you'd better support that "artificial monopoly" called a copyright for all you're worth, because without it, there is no music industry - just amateurs and enthusiests producing in their spare time. I don't know 'bout the rest of you, but paying a few bucks for a CD doesn't seem like such tyrrany in this light.
Not necessarily. If you look at genes and proteins in a slightly different light - as the functions that the genetic program can work with, then knowning how many there are and where they're located can give you some idea of what the rest of the program is working with. And since, at least for now, we can't just search for function call equivalents, counting the functions is our best alternative.
A while back my keyboard stopped working and since I couldn't go out that instant and buy a new one, I decided to try taking the old one apart to fix it. I don't know exactly what the problem was, but it turns out that I was still able to type using the sheet of sensors that lies below the keys. Essentially, it was a zero-pressure keyboard, and it was completely useless. Part of the problem was that the sensors were smaller than the keys themselves (which I'm sure wouldn't be a problem on this new device.)However, I also had all of the aforementioned problems - super-sensitive keys, inability to rest my hands, and a general dislike of the lack of tactile response. For anybody who's used to being able to type without looking at the keyboard or the screen (ie: focusing only on copy, if any is present), a device such as the FingerBoard would be more of a burden than a help.