Any unauthorized copy is a copyright violation, whether or not you upload or download, whether or not you knew it was an illegal copy, and even whether or not the person you got it from purported to give you a license.
This is not universally true either.
Perhaps your argument holds by US law, but not by all national copyright laws. 95% of the human population does not live in the US.
The musical instrument is played much like a theremin [...]
Clearly whoever wrote this has never seen, let alone played a theremin.
You don't play a theremin by rotating a mobile phone (or anything) in your hand. There is no notion of angle, since you play with your bare hands, only distance. The distance to the vertical antenna determines the pitch, whereas the distance to the horizontal circular antenna controls the volume. The whole point is the expressiveness of playing music with your whole body.
If you want a small silly toy theremin, you should order Vol. 17 of Japanese magazine Otona no kagaku (the whole thing is in Japanese, but easy enough to build). You can only control the pitch, the sound is pretty awful, and you cannot place calls with it, but at least it's a theremin.
Yet the developers refuse to add a "resize input area" plugin to the list of default plugins (despite the demand) for fear of cluttering up the plugin area. It is alreadycluttered.
Also, how do these things compare to the devices on the Japanese market? During my recent trip to Japan I saw a similar device on display all over Japan. Sorry, I don't know a brand name, but clearly vendors also want to fill this niche in the Japanese market.
The Japanese market doesn't really need those internet tablets, because they have been surfing the web (and lots of other services, including emails instead of SMS/MMS) for years, using their mobile phones. Granted, the screen isn't as large, but the screens of mobile phones in Japan is still larger than the usual EU/USA mobile, thus the popularity of clamshell phones. They tend to get pretty damn thin by now too.
It's not touch screen either, it doesn't have a thumbkeyboard (only the usual digit keyboard), but I don't think an internet table would be half as attractive in a country where providers have been pushing and giving their customers ubiquitous internet access for a long time. You rarely see people using PDAs or blackberries in Japan, because phones already do everything you need (search infos on the web, book your cinema, live GPS with voice directions, pay your beers at the convenient store, email, video conferencing).
In fact if this seems to indicate one thing, it is by how much the rest of the world lags behind in terms of telecommunications, if you need a separate device, that uses WiFi instead of the ubiquitous GPS/UMTS network, to read Slashdot when you're out. Providers in Europe and the USA need to wake up and stop charging ridiculous pricing for internet connectivity over 3G. The infrastructure is there, it's just time to sell customers what they want, at a price they can afford.
Disclaimer: I'm European, but in Switzerland, I can't afford getting online off the UMTS network. I'll be ordering my N810 soon.
But theoretically it is the same as having a robot with many parts (i.e. higher dimensional phase space).
No, it isn't.
Swarm intelligence relies on emergence that arises from many simple agents that interact locally with each other (i.e. without a master controller), using minimal rules. These are the keypoints of this field: there isn't a single point of failure, you can ensure degradation of service gracefully, you can even perform self-repair, etc. It allows to solve large problems without having to implement a complex monolithic system.
Naturally, the difficulties then lie in defining the right rules for the swarm of agents to generate the expected macroscopic group behaviour.
I never saw any real applications.
I know of at least one shipping company (in Switzerland IIRC) that uses swarm intelligence techniques to give a good solution to the TSP in reasonable time, and uses that to schedule the plan for its trucks daily. More applications are being developed, including small robots to inspect parts in inaccessible locations (e.g. airplane), etc.
I was at the worldcon and he told me that he was surprised too, and the only reason he had won was because they couldn't give it to Ken McLeod this time around because he hadn't published any book that year. And yes, I was also disappointed that he didn't win the Hugo with Glasshouse.
Do you check your email from your laptop in the subway, while walking in the city, in a supermarket, at a concert? Would you really carry it around when you go out at night to be able to check out directions using GPS when you get lost?
Maybe it is partially related to the fact that Japanese use public transportation a lot; it's obviously hard to browse the web no matter what device you have if you're driving (since the majority of US citizens drive, alone in their cars). But still, a keitai is a very convenient internet device for daily use, and that's why Japanese use them so much.
I wish that when I come back to Europe, I could get a phone without all the useless features (bad camera, polyphonic ringtones, etc) but with which I could browse the web for free and send regular emails from my phone instead of expensive 250 char-long SMSes (or even more expensive MMS).
Japanese phones don't really do much magic; they just do what I (and possibly many other people here) find useful much better than US/European phones.
The swarm intelligence algorithm is ran offline to determine a solution to the global problem. Indeed, ants "run" the "algorithm" inline as they don't leave the nest with a full plan of action, but the method used is still swarm intelligence, as opposed to, say, standard heuristic-based TSP solvers. The reason why it's not ran inline is that the cost of doing so is larger than the benefit, since the conditions are not very dynamic.
By the way there are many papers on the topic, although it's quite recent, just citeseer for "swarm intelligence".
Not really, the nomenclature exists, it's called swarm intelligence. It's referred to in the article, it's the name of the (few) reference literature, etc. I've never heard it referred to as "swarm theory" or "swarm behaviour", and I took a swarm intelligence course last year, so I'm not sure why it was called like that in the slashdot excerpt in the first place.
Wow, someone quoting my article on slashdot (without him being me)..
I suppose the idea of Collections is indeed related to the question asked in this topic, but it might be more of a conceptual solution than an actual ready-made application. Stay tuned for XMMS2 clients implementing collections in the near future, once they are implemented in the XMMS2 server!
If anything, that definition should be added to the OED along with the others: [...]
Heh for once, the french dictionary seems to have adopted it before the others:
AVATAR n. m. [...] 4. Représentation virtuelle créée par un internaute pour évoluer dans le cyberespace. [Virtual representation created by someone on the internet to move in cyberspace.] (Petit Robert 2006).
I fear that my generation (I'm 28) might be one of those unlucky historical examples of one which didn't get to do jack shit
What about witnessing the birth of the Internet, the first ever global web between people on Earth? A revolution doesn't need to be a spectacular effort, it can be a technology that changes society as a whole.
I use an IE bug to display a special message on my homepage. It is only displayed in IE, not in Mozilla, Opera, Safari, lynx, etc. The idea is to encourage people and inform them that there exist better alternatives.
Do the same on your website, maybe we should start a movement of information like that.
Why is it modded funny? I also went to a Subway in Saint-Petersburg on Nevsky Prospect; there are definitely a lot of american fastfoods in Russia nowadays. One of the few places where some of the cashiers speak english actually -- which made us prefer the aventure of typical russian restaurants with no ways to communicate with the waitress.
As you will note in TFA, it is a law that applies only to music, games and videos.
No.
I can put a video on my homepage and you can download it legally from Sweden if I allow you to, even though I hold the copyright for it. When you create an item with artistic or creative value, you hold the copyright for it by default (at least in most countries). So all this fuss about downloading "copyrighted material" is bullshit; "everything" with artistic/creative value is protected by copyright. Even a game under the GPL is copyrighted, it doesn't mean it is illegal to download it.
It is illegal to download material protected by copyright whose holder doesn't grant you the right to copy/share it.
Wow. You were so sure you'd hate it, that you rushed out during its first week in theatres and couldn't wait to stand in line and pay full price to see it, eh?
There was no queue, and here in Europe the price does not depend on how many weeks it has been on screen. If it does in the US, I didn't even know it.
I didn't "rush", it's been out for a week and I have exams coming so I thought I might as well see it before. This is the kind of movie you see in a theatre or you don't, because the main purpose of it is to be spectacular, both visuals and sound. I went there hoping to be surprised because of my low expectations, it simply did not happen.
As for the "you elitist asshole" part, I do love movies such as Lost in Translation, Mulholland Drive or Coffee and Cigarette. Yet, I also loved Lord of the Rings, or even enjoyed Spiderman 2. Hell, the LOTR books are among the most popular in the world and they're still my favourite.
Sorry but you're just wrong on this one. It has nothing to do with its popularity, the movie was fun but nowhere close to being memorable or worth all the attention. OldeTimeGeek has a good summary lower in this thread:
Decent entertainment? yes. Fun? yes. SF? Not quite. Good SF? Not even close.
Slashdot Mirror
Any unauthorized copy is a copyright violation, whether or not you upload or download, whether or not you knew it was an illegal copy, and even whether or not the person you got it from purported to give you a license.
This is not universally true either.
Perhaps your argument holds by US law, but not by all national copyright laws. 95% of the human population does not live in the US.
Clearly whoever wrote this has never seen, let alone played a theremin.
You don't play a theremin by rotating a mobile phone (or anything) in your hand. There is no notion of angle, since you play with your bare hands, only distance. The distance to the vertical antenna determines the pitch, whereas the distance to the horizontal circular antenna controls the volume. The whole point is the expressiveness of playing music with your whole body.
If you want a small silly toy theremin, you should order Vol. 17 of Japanese magazine Otona no kagaku (the whole thing is in Japanese, but easy enough to build). You can only control the pitch, the sound is pretty awful, and you cannot place calls with it, but at least it's a theremin.
No. Only that he was German.
It's not explained in the article, nor did I find anything by Googling it.
Are we missing something important here?
The Japanese market doesn't really need those internet tablets, because they have been surfing the web (and lots of other services, including emails instead of SMS/MMS) for years, using their mobile phones. Granted, the screen isn't as large, but the screens of mobile phones in Japan is still larger than the usual EU/USA mobile, thus the popularity of clamshell phones. They tend to get pretty damn thin by now too.
It's not touch screen either, it doesn't have a thumbkeyboard (only the usual digit keyboard), but I don't think an internet table would be half as attractive in a country where providers have been pushing and giving their customers ubiquitous internet access for a long time. You rarely see people using PDAs or blackberries in Japan, because phones already do everything you need (search infos on the web, book your cinema, live GPS with voice directions, pay your beers at the convenient store, email, video conferencing).
In fact if this seems to indicate one thing, it is by how much the rest of the world lags behind in terms of telecommunications, if you need a separate device, that uses WiFi instead of the ubiquitous GPS/UMTS network, to read Slashdot when you're out. Providers in Europe and the USA need to wake up and stop charging ridiculous pricing for internet connectivity over 3G. The infrastructure is there, it's just time to sell customers what they want, at a price they can afford.
Disclaimer: I'm European, but in Switzerland, I can't afford getting online off the UMTS network. I'll be ordering my N810 soon.
Cory was actually commissioned to write a story on this topic.
No, it isn't.
Swarm intelligence relies on emergence that arises from many simple agents that interact locally with each other (i.e. without a master controller), using minimal rules. These are the keypoints of this field: there isn't a single point of failure, you can ensure degradation of service gracefully, you can even perform self-repair, etc. It allows to solve large problems without having to implement a complex monolithic system.
Naturally, the difficulties then lie in defining the right rules for the swarm of agents to generate the expected macroscopic group behaviour.
I know of at least one shipping company (in Switzerland IIRC) that uses swarm intelligence techniques to give a good solution to the TSP in reasonable time, and uses that to schedule the plan for its trucks daily. More applications are being developed, including small robots to inspect parts in inaccessible locations (e.g. airplane), etc.
I was at the worldcon and he told me that he was surprised too, and the only reason he had won was because they couldn't give it to Ken McLeod this time around because he hadn't published any book that year. And yes, I was also disappointed that he didn't win the Hugo with Glasshouse.
I wonder if someone were to give Elton John an internet literacy test how he would do.
Maybe he, too, is attracted by viewing the internet as a series of tubes.
Do you check your email from your laptop in the subway, while walking in the city, in a supermarket, at a concert? Would you really carry it around when you go out at night to be able to check out directions using GPS when you get lost?
Maybe it is partially related to the fact that Japanese use public transportation a lot; it's obviously hard to browse the web no matter what device you have if you're driving (since the majority of US citizens drive, alone in their cars). But still, a keitai is a very convenient internet device for daily use, and that's why Japanese use them so much.
I wish that when I come back to Europe, I could get a phone without all the useless features (bad camera, polyphonic ringtones, etc) but with which I could browse the web for free and send regular emails from my phone instead of expensive 250 char-long SMSes (or even more expensive MMS).
Japanese phones don't really do much magic; they just do what I (and possibly many other people here) find useful much better than US/European phones.
The swarm intelligence algorithm is ran offline to determine a solution to the global problem. Indeed, ants "run" the "algorithm" inline as they don't leave the nest with a full plan of action, but the method used is still swarm intelligence, as opposed to, say, standard heuristic-based TSP solvers. The reason why it's not ran inline is that the cost of doing so is larger than the benefit, since the conditions are not very dynamic.
By the way there are many papers on the topic, although it's quite recent, just citeseer for "swarm intelligence".
Not really, the nomenclature exists, it's called swarm intelligence. It's referred to in the article, it's the name of the (few) reference literature, etc. I've never heard it referred to as "swarm theory" or "swarm behaviour", and I took a swarm intelligence course last year, so I'm not sure why it was called like that in the slashdot excerpt in the first place.
Wow, someone quoting my article on slashdot (without him being me)..
I suppose the idea of Collections is indeed related to the question asked in this topic, but it might be more of a conceptual solution than an actual ready-made application. Stay tuned for XMMS2 clients implementing collections in the near future, once they are implemented in the XMMS2 server!
Heh for once, the french dictionary seems to have adopted it before the others:
AVATAR n. m. [...] 4. Représentation virtuelle créée par un internaute pour évoluer dans le cyberespace. [Virtual representation created by someone on the internet to move in cyberspace.] (Petit Robert 2006).
Neat.
What about witnessing the birth of the Internet, the first ever global web between people on Earth? A revolution doesn't need to be a spectacular effort, it can be a technology that changes society as a whole.
Oops my server is down, I'll have a look at that...
I use an IE bug to display a special message on my homepage. It is only displayed in IE, not in Mozilla, Opera, Safari, lynx, etc. The idea is to encourage people and inform them that there exist better alternatives.
Do the same on your website, maybe we should start a movement of information like that.
Why is it modded funny? I also went to a Subway in Saint-Petersburg on Nevsky Prospect; there are definitely a lot of american fastfoods in Russia nowadays. One of the few places where some of the cashiers speak english actually -- which made us prefer the aventure of typical russian restaurants with no ways to communicate with the waitress.
Actually it's more like explicit advertising and subliminal post content.
As you will note in TFA, it is a law that applies only to music, games and videos.
No.
I can put a video on my homepage and you can download it legally from Sweden if I allow you to, even though I hold the copyright for it. When you create an item with artistic or creative value, you hold the copyright for it by default (at least in most countries). So all this fuss about downloading "copyrighted material" is bullshit; "everything" with artistic/creative value is protected by copyright. Even a game under the GPL is copyrighted, it doesn't mean it is illegal to download it.
It is illegal to download material protected by copyright whose holder doesn't grant you the right to copy/share it.
MB: Megabyte (1000*1000=10^6 bytes)
MiB: Mebibyte (1024*1024=2^20 bytes)
Is AMD planning to include DRM in their processors as well?
Wow. You were so sure you'd hate it, that you rushed out during its first week in theatres and couldn't wait to stand in line and pay full price to see it, eh?
There was no queue, and here in Europe the price does not depend on how many weeks it has been on screen. If it does in the US, I didn't even know it.
I didn't "rush", it's been out for a week and I have exams coming so I thought I might as well see it before. This is the kind of movie you see in a theatre or you don't, because the main purpose of it is to be spectacular, both visuals and sound. I went there hoping to be surprised because of my low expectations, it simply did not happen.
As for the "you elitist asshole" part, I do love movies such as Lost in Translation, Mulholland Drive or Coffee and Cigarette. Yet, I also loved Lord of the Rings, or even enjoyed Spiderman 2. Hell, the LOTR books are among the most popular in the world and they're still my favourite.
Sorry but you're just wrong on this one. It has nothing to do with its popularity, the movie was fun but nowhere close to being memorable or worth all the attention. OldeTimeGeek has a good summary lower in this thread:
Decent entertainment? yes. Fun? yes. SF? Not quite. Good SF? Not even close.
The movies were his trilogy, based on someone else's (fantastic) work indeed.