Yeah; unfortunately the digi-cable boxes in my area don't have them. Apparently our local Comcast affiliate's theory is "if you were meant to have it, then the FCC would mandate that you get it."
So we don't get anything that's not required by law, pretty much. I can't even get a HD box with a working FireWire output, and I'm almost certain that there's an FCC regulation which requires them to provide me with one on request.
If I didn't get the cable TV for a very good price along with my internet service, I'd cancel them and just be happy watching NetFlix and grabbing my TV shows from BitTorrent. As it is, I barely watch it anyway; it's more for my roommates and guests to watch.
Well I can only guess why it's that way; my thoughts were that perhaps the point of the S-Video on the input and not the output is so you can record at some semblance of quality (although S-Video really isn't that great), and then download the digital file out through the network port, and watch it somewhere else.
Or, maybe they figure that by the time the signal gets compressed and played back, it'll be basically composite-video quality anyway, so that it's not necessary to have S-video output; it would just be wasted. Basically you want to preserve information as far into the compression process as you can, but once it's digitized, then your outputs only need to be good enough to play back the compressed material. (Still, I'd hope the device is capable of better quality encodes than the 300-something lines of baseband composite video. Yech.)
Either way I'm not exactly floored by it. There aren't that many devices that I can think of today, which have S-video outputs and not some kind of better-quality signal (Component, RGB, or some type of digital signal whether uncompressed on DVI or HDMI, or compressed on Firewire). Most video devices today are either going to have a high quality interface, or a low-quality one via composite or RF. There aren't many things around that use the "medium quality" S-Video exclusively; it just seems like a really odd choice today.
I tend to wonder if the ADC chip that they're using is one that can only deal with Y/C as its inputs, rather than Y/Pb/Pr or R/G/B. If that's the case, it might explain why the S-Video input; perhaps it's the highest-quality input their selected chip would work with. Still, this doesn't explain the utter lack of a digital input.
Yeah, I was surprised when I saw that it didn't have a DVI port. I mean, it's got everything else that it would need to be a really slick product... except that it's analog only.
So really it's just a glorified 480i ADC with a network card and a USB port. I'm somewhat unimpressed. The card reader slots really don't add anything for me, either. Except as storage for the machine itself, I can't ever foresee myself using them.
But... SVideo? I mean, hello, 1986 calling. What's the purpose of that, so I can connect it to my SVHS deck? How about my Laserdisc player?
As I said in another comment, I find Neuros very intriguing as a company, and I hope that they sell enough of these things to stay afloat and make a better model that will do digital recording, preferably soon, before the media companies and their lackeys at the FCC push through a Broadcast Flag.
I think most TiVO units have "IR Blasters" which are little dongles that go over the IR port on your cableco's box, and switch the channel and otherwise control it.
So basically, you "watch" the output from the TiVO on your monitor/television, and do all your programming and stuff. When the TiVO wants to get a particular signal from the cable box, either so you can watch it live or so it can record it, it sends a signal via the IR blaster into the cable box, switching the channel.
I don't know how reliable they are, and the whole thing reeks of 'kludge' to me, but I know some friends that swear by this setup.
Personally, I think it's too bad that nobody thought to mandate some sort of standardized control interface for cable and TV tuners; a serial port on the back of those DTV boxes would make all the IR stuff unnecessary.
Neuros seems like a really intriguing company. I haven't (yet) purchased any of their gear, mostly because I'm currently happy with my third-gen iPod and relatively ancient USB EyeTV tuner, but I like the way they seem to be developing products.
The killer is going to be software, though; if they can't get a cohesive user experience down, the best software in the world isn't worth more than a VCR. With all the digital covergence stuff, interoperability and ease of use are the two main pillars that support everything else. By using open standards and free software, I'm confident they'll have interoperability on the technical side, but I wonder about the ease of use and vertical integration with other parts of the "user stack." (That is, the applications that let the users do particular tasks, like pull a recording from the STB and burn it to a DVD; will there be one integrated app to do that? Or will it require an awkward chain of tools?)
But in general, I think they're on the right track, and it's refreshing to see a company produce a product that honestly looks neat. It's been a while since I've seen that.
Now, if only they made one that would record DTV without dropping it to an analog signal first...an ADC is nice, but it seems a little late. TV is going digital, and I'd love to see an unencumbered recording device that worked there, before the FCC gets in there and starts crippling things.
You call it "wasted," I call it "some of the best times I ever had."
(shrug) All depends on what there is to do and who else is around, I guess. I used to hang out with this old, cranky, brilliant, and thoroughly entertaining physics professor; he'd help me with projects in the lab in return for mowing his lawn.
Given what time on some of the equipment I used costs, not to mention materials that I might-or-might-not-have used, that was probably the most lucrative lawn-mowing I'll ever do.
I firmly belive that at least 60% of my learning in college took place outside of classes. And a non-trivial amount of that happened in pubs. But that's another story.
Racing through college like that just seems like wasted opportunities galore. Not only for the social interaction, which he almost certainly didn't get, but to take all sorts of other classes.
There are whole fields of study that I never would have had any clue about, except that I saw them in a course catalog when I was an undergrad and thought "what the hell, I'll take it." Economics, for example, is now a big interest of mine, and there's no way I would have taken it, if I had been just trying to bang out the minimum graduation requirements.
I wish this guy the best, but I think he's driving too hard and too fast for specialization. Even for a patent attorney, having some concept for things outside your area of interest is a good idea. That doesn't mean you need to take twelve credits of Underwater Basketweaving, just that there are a lot of things that you can learn about (particularly a big school like UVA), and it's a shame to pass up those opportunities, as they're rather difficult to come by later.
I was surprised as well that they declined to mention those... baser... guilty pleasures, which we all know the Internet is just so accomadating of.
As to the "dirty porn" question, my personal feeling is that the cost to society of censoring certain types of content are greater than the questionable benefits of not having it out there. I've never seen any really good analysis showing (with some proof of causation, not just corellation) that the availiability of internet porn has caused more real-world crime; lacking that proof I think that there's no legitimate mandate for censorship of any kind.
Personally, if I was the one in charge of regulating smut, I'd probably start by looking at pornography that promotes or exemplifies unsafe sex practices in terms of STD risk, since I have to believe that the effects of that are probably greater than the small number of individuals who are actually driven to commit crime because of porn (and wouldn't have done something anyway in its absence).
I think deviant individuals will probably always seek out whatever is taboo in their society; if it was one where porn wasn't allowed, they'd be ogling the Sears catalog. I see no reason why limiting access to particular media really changes an individual's tendency towards antisocial behavior.
Back in the heady days of the late 1990s, I had one of the first MP3 players among my group of friends. It was a thing called the Pontis MPlayer3, and used MultiMediaCards for storage.
The two advertised methods for acquiring music were either ripping it on your computer and downloading it to the device (via a serial port -- oh, the pain), or buying albums on pre-flashed, read-only MultiMediaCards. I never saw any in stores, and the format seems to have gone the way of the dodo now, but at the time, Pontis and a few other manufacturers were pushing it hard.
You'd get the usual packaging and liner notes, but instead of a CD you'd just have the chip. It wasn't erasable, so unless you physically broke it, you'd have a backup forever. One of my friends who went to Germany actually bought some albums in this format, although what they were I can't tell you. I'm not sure about what DRM it had, if any; I think it must have been minimal, because the machine wasn't capable of playing back anything besides straight MP3 files. (Heck, it was picky enough about certain types of VBR joint-stereo encoding and ID3 tags.) Perhaps this contributed to the lack of titles I ever saw in the U.S.
I thought this was a neat concept; except that the player was a failure and MMC got nixed in favor of that abomination known as Secure Digital (which the Pontis wouldn't use), I think it could have had a future. As I recall, the format had some sort of cute-ish marketing name, but I can't find it now.
That was also the last time I decided to be an early adopter...
That seems like buying somebody's used underwear or something. It's a consumable product. Any given record can only be played a certain number of times before it's worn out. Each time you put the stylus through the groove, it destroys a little of the information that's there.
With a CD, it either plays or it doesn't. Provided that there aren't any scratches or fingerprints or other problems with the disc, the 1,000th play will sound exactly the same as the first. Thus the value of a "virgin" CD is basically nil. However, I'd never buy a used record, particularly without knowing the source and how well they've taken care of it. How are you supposed to know what you're buying?
Now this would be different if everyone was using laser turntables, but sadly they arrived on the scene a little too late to replace mechanical styli, they're too entrenched and the economy of scale will never exist to bring down the price of contactless 'tables. Pity, too: DRM free, analog music, with the never-dimishing quality of digital. Doesn't get much better than that.
This is certainly a risk, but it's not an unmanageable one.
Over arbitrarily long periods, periods where an investment would have been un-profitable are exceptions rather than the rule. A well-diversified portfolio would not be at great risk of bankruptcy, barring some sort of catastrophic civilizational collapse (the sort of thing that would probably entail physical disruption of the sleeping folks anyway).
Even if you woke up in the next century's equivalent of the Great Depression, properly invested assets (including foreign currencies, real property, and precious metals and commodities) could probably give you a guarantee of at least enough funds to get on your feet. Or alternately, provide enough of an income stream to allow you to just go back to sleep for another 50 years: I have heard it said that even considering the Great Depression, the U.S. securities market has been profitable over any 50 year period.
There's always the chance that the markets will just completely tank, but given our present society and the way that it looks like it's going, that's probably right up there with global thermonuclear war on the scale of catastrophic events you can't really plan for. If it happens, you'll be one of billions of penniless people.
Excepting a few drastic scenarios, I don't think it would be hard for a person with a lot of assets to invest them in 50-year "fire and forget" chunks; the key would just be conservatism and diversification. Ultimately, the risk would just be deciding how long you think society will last.
I can't see how living for 50 years as a 70-year-old will help anyone
I can. Right now, when you think of "living...as a 70-year-old," you think of someone who may not be totally independent, or whose mental and physical faculties are dimished. In short, someone who is probably a burden to society, taking the social equivalent of a 'desk by the window' while they live out their time.
Except that even now, that's not true (heck, I know people who are still razor sharp and running marathons at 70), and future advances in medical technology will mean it's even less so. The goal of anti-aging research isn't to just let people live longer -- making that period of elderly dotage longer -- but to make a person's middle age, their productive years, longer. In short, to give people more useful life.
So at some point, I could easily see where someone could live as a 70-year-old and be a great benefit to society. They would have 70 years of learning and experience behind them, but still have the physical and mental acumen that we now associate with a 30 or 40-year-old. Those people could and would be, productive members of society. More than that, even; they would be vast repositories of experience, having lived through nearly twice what an average worker of today has probably seen.
In a world that seems to be obsessed with the short term, I could see us benefiting greatly from advances that allow people who've been around for a century or more to still be active participants in decisionmaking.
I would assume that the tradeoff for being frozen and living forever would be mandatory sterilization; if you want to live forever, then there's no need for you to have children.
I could imagine some point at which our understanding of neuroscience and neurology improves to the point where a living human brain could be transplanted from one body to another, or its contents uploaded to a new wetware container. Thus, you could have yourself repeatedly cloned and preserve your consiousness across the ages, barring accidental death. In that case, you have to look at your clones as being effectively your "children," only with your personality.
Alternately, if you decide to have children naturally, you can look at it as alternative to cloning, where you simply mix the genetic material up with somebody else's, and then don't do any of the personality or brain-transfer stuff.
Obviously allowing people to do both -- live for arbitrarily long periods and have children -- would be a recipe for disaster, unless humanity was in the process of expanding its territory. However I think people at some point could be offered the choice of extending themselves directly, or via their children.
I have never heard this, but it does make a certain amount of sense; mice certainly have no reason to be as 'optimized' for longevity as humans are.
Perhaps if we looked at animals that are more human-like in terms of reproductive strategies, we'd see some better optimizations than even we have?
I'm thinking particularly about whales; many species have only one chance at reproducing per season, due to their migration patterns, and have 12-month or longer gestations. I'm not sure how long infant whales take before they split from their mothers, but I'm betting it's significant as well. Perhaps not long enough to encourage inter-generational "families," but not the quick turnaround of animals that have litters.
Perhaps our choice of study animals is causing us to think we're making progress, when in reality we're only imitating what evolution has already done for us? Not that this is all bad, undoubtedly we'll learn lots in the process.
I tend to wonder; could a person refuse to divulge an encryption key on Fifth Amendment grounds?
It seems like this has to have happened before, so there's probably precedent on it somewhere. If you know that by revealing the key, you're going to be incriminating yourself, it seems like you might have grounds for refusal. That would keep you from being charged with contempt. That would also probably allow your spouse(s) to refuse to incriminate you, as well.
I could also see how a court could rule that an encryption key or password isn't "protected speech" though, in the same way that they've curtailed the First Amendment. IMO, I would think that the encryption key is a pretty big piece of evidence in itself, since it's the only way to show that the plaintext came from the ciphertext; thus disclosing a password or key really is testifying against oneself. Not that logic really plays any great role in modern jurisprudence, as far as I can tell.
I've seen discussions about this on sci.crypt and other places, but never a definitive answer.
You would think so, but I bet that in a lot of cases, they'd just treat your possession of the contraband as prima facie evidence of a crime.
It's like drug possession -- if the cops toss your car and find a kilo of China White or a handgun with the serial number scratched off in the glove compartment, your insistence that it's not yours may not keep you out of trouble. Just having it, in a place that was under your control, is the crime. A demonstration of intent is not necessary. In effect, it means that the burden of proof is shifted to the defendant to explain themselves, and if they cannot provide a justification for the evidence, they're guilty.
Frankly I think "prima facie" laws in general are a travesty of justice; we ought to abolish the whole philosophy and get back to a more intent-focused jurisprudence. But of course if you tried to do that, you'd be keelhauled for being supportive of crime and criminals, because in the short term it would make the work of the police harder.
In general, a lot of "possession" laws (drug possession, weapon possession, pornography, "burglar's tools") are intentionally written this way so that a demonstration of intent is unnecessary, and many laws include the phrase "prima facie" verbatim. (See this Montana weapon law, for example.)
I RTFAed, but I still don't understand exactly how the program is going to work, where the money is going to come from, or what the controversy is about.
They call it "coin operated coding," but are they going to let users choose what work their money gets used to fund? So if I want, say, better window transparency, then I can donate $20 and he'll spend 15 or 30 minutes working on that someday? Or is it just the electronic version of one of those "money thermometers" that everyone's seen in front of their local Lion's Club / Church / Women's Auxiliary, proclaiming how close or far away donors are from a predetermined goal that will allow something to happen?
For something that's being touted as a new method of funding, it sure seems rather vaporous to me. Anyone want to fill in on exactly how it's supposed to work?
Unfortunately, separating out the people who are smart enough and have enough foresight to use power wisely, from those who would just use it for short-term or personal gain, is a Hard Problem; if not in the mathematical sense than its equivalent in the political/social science one.
If you had a machine that could read a person's "true nature" and spit out whether they would be a responsible member of society or not, then certainly you could only allow those people to vote and we'd all be better for it. However, as no machine has yet been constructed, we cannot do this.
Failing that, the best system anyone has been able to come up with so far, relies on the other extreme: let everyone have a small say in government, and hope that there are more good and smart people than mean and stupid ones; that this works at all is a bit surprising, but yet it seems to do okay for itself, or at least better than any alternative system that has yet been tried. To quote an old cliche, 'democracy sucks, but the alternatives are worse.'
So certainly, there are a lot of idiots out there who sadly are allowed to both vote and reproduce, unfortunately this is the cost of doing business, as it were; there's no way to prevent them from doing those things, without destroying society in the process. Any system that we could practically create to weed out "idiots" would by definition be imperfect, and the result would probably be worse than where we are right now.
Neatness is one thing, but those examples just look like an advertising photo for nylon wire ties. I mean, they look nice now, but what happens when you need to move one of those connections around, say from one port to another?
You'd have to cut 50 different ties, and all the wires are cut to such precise lengths, you'd probably end up having to splice some sort of nasty extender in there (adding a significant insertion loss due to the connectors or splice). It would be a total mess. Having everything wired in drum-tight may look nice, but it's a bitch later on. Something that has more "drip loops" before all the wires get bundled up into single harnesses may not look quite as polished initially, but it's far easier to work on down the road.
I've worked on audio systems like this, and it always strikes me as something that you'd do if you were a contractor working on a one-shot job, something where you want to impress the client and justify your fee, with no real thought to maintenance later.
The contrast on your morality is set too high.
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Napster On the Block
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If you want to equate copying a bunch of bits to bribery or assault, that's fine.
However, most people don't think they're on the same level, as evidenced by the rampant amounts of technically illegal copying that goes on, and the significantly less-than-rampant amount of bribery and assault.
Lumping everything in life together under "legal" and "illegal" may be fine in elementary school, but most people don't think that way. If you think life is that black and white, congratulations and I wish you the best.
You might as well condemn people who drive 70 in a 65 MPH zone, since they're breaking the law, too; I'd go on to argue that it's probably significantly worse than copyright violation, since you can easily kill somebody by speeding, while I am going to go out on a limb and say that the number of people killed by pirated music is very low. Certainly something that has the risk of killing other people ought to be less morally defensible than a basically victimless, economic "crime." (Particularly a crime where the damages to society are nebulous at best; who's to say how much money piracy actually diverts from legitimate business and fails to recreate in other sectors of the economy?)
Until we've eliminated all the more significant forms of crime in the world, I think our effort and attention -- both in terms of moral outrage and law-enforcement resources -- would be better directed elsewhere, perhaps at the crimes that cause real physical harm to real people.
Besides, what is sulfur dioxide going to do to our lungs?
By the time you get up to the stratosphere, which is the level where they're talking about doing the sulphur-dioxide business, your lungs will have worse things to worry about than the smell.
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Yeah; unfortunately the digi-cable boxes in my area don't have them. Apparently our local Comcast affiliate's theory is "if you were meant to have it, then the FCC would mandate that you get it."
So we don't get anything that's not required by law, pretty much. I can't even get a HD box with a working FireWire output, and I'm almost certain that there's an FCC regulation which requires them to provide me with one on request.
If I didn't get the cable TV for a very good price along with my internet service, I'd cancel them and just be happy watching NetFlix and grabbing my TV shows from BitTorrent. As it is, I barely watch it anyway; it's more for my roommates and guests to watch.
Well I can only guess why it's that way; my thoughts were that perhaps the point of the S-Video on the input and not the output is so you can record at some semblance of quality (although S-Video really isn't that great), and then download the digital file out through the network port, and watch it somewhere else.
Or, maybe they figure that by the time the signal gets compressed and played back, it'll be basically composite-video quality anyway, so that it's not necessary to have S-video output; it would just be wasted. Basically you want to preserve information as far into the compression process as you can, but once it's digitized, then your outputs only need to be good enough to play back the compressed material. (Still, I'd hope the device is capable of better quality encodes than the 300-something lines of baseband composite video. Yech.)
Either way I'm not exactly floored by it. There aren't that many devices that I can think of today, which have S-video outputs and not some kind of better-quality signal (Component, RGB, or some type of digital signal whether uncompressed on DVI or HDMI, or compressed on Firewire). Most video devices today are either going to have a high quality interface, or a low-quality one via composite or RF. There aren't many things around that use the "medium quality" S-Video exclusively; it just seems like a really odd choice today.
I tend to wonder if the ADC chip that they're using is one that can only deal with Y/C as its inputs, rather than Y/Pb/Pr or R/G/B. If that's the case, it might explain why the S-Video input; perhaps it's the highest-quality input their selected chip would work with. Still, this doesn't explain the utter lack of a digital input.
Yeah, I was surprised when I saw that it didn't have a DVI port. I mean, it's got everything else that it would need to be a really slick product ... except that it's analog only.
... SVideo? I mean, hello, 1986 calling. What's the purpose of that, so I can connect it to my SVHS deck? How about my Laserdisc player?
So really it's just a glorified 480i ADC with a network card and a USB port. I'm somewhat unimpressed. The card reader slots really don't add anything for me, either. Except as storage for the machine itself, I can't ever foresee myself using them.
But
As I said in another comment, I find Neuros very intriguing as a company, and I hope that they sell enough of these things to stay afloat and make a better model that will do digital recording, preferably soon, before the media companies and their lackeys at the FCC push through a Broadcast Flag.
I think most TiVO units have "IR Blasters" which are little dongles that go over the IR port on your cableco's box, and switch the channel and otherwise control it.
So basically, you "watch" the output from the TiVO on your monitor/television, and do all your programming and stuff. When the TiVO wants to get a particular signal from the cable box, either so you can watch it live or so it can record it, it sends a signal via the IR blaster into the cable box, switching the channel.
I don't know how reliable they are, and the whole thing reeks of 'kludge' to me, but I know some friends that swear by this setup.
Personally, I think it's too bad that nobody thought to mandate some sort of standardized control interface for cable and TV tuners; a serial port on the back of those DTV boxes would make all the IR stuff unnecessary.
Neuros seems like a really intriguing company. I haven't (yet) purchased any of their gear, mostly because I'm currently happy with my third-gen iPod and relatively ancient USB EyeTV tuner, but I like the way they seem to be developing products.
The killer is going to be software, though; if they can't get a cohesive user experience down, the best software in the world isn't worth more than a VCR. With all the digital covergence stuff, interoperability and ease of use are the two main pillars that support everything else. By using open standards and free software, I'm confident they'll have interoperability on the technical side, but I wonder about the ease of use and vertical integration with other parts of the "user stack." (That is, the applications that let the users do particular tasks, like pull a recording from the STB and burn it to a DVD; will there be one integrated app to do that? Or will it require an awkward chain of tools?)
But in general, I think they're on the right track, and it's refreshing to see a company produce a product that honestly looks neat. It's been a while since I've seen that.
Now, if only they made one that would record DTV without dropping it to an analog signal first...an ADC is nice, but it seems a little late. TV is going digital, and I'd love to see an unencumbered recording device that worked there, before the FCC gets in there and starts crippling things.
You call it "wasted," I call it "some of the best times I ever had."
(shrug) All depends on what there is to do and who else is around, I guess. I used to hang out with this old, cranky, brilliant, and thoroughly entertaining physics professor; he'd help me with projects in the lab in return for mowing his lawn.
Given what time on some of the equipment I used costs, not to mention materials that I might-or-might-not-have used, that was probably the most lucrative lawn-mowing I'll ever do.
I firmly belive that at least 60% of my learning in college took place outside of classes. And a non-trivial amount of that happened in pubs. But that's another story.
I was going to say the exact same thing.
Racing through college like that just seems like wasted opportunities galore. Not only for the social interaction, which he almost certainly didn't get, but to take all sorts of other classes.
There are whole fields of study that I never would have had any clue about, except that I saw them in a course catalog when I was an undergrad and thought "what the hell, I'll take it." Economics, for example, is now a big interest of mine, and there's no way I would have taken it, if I had been just trying to bang out the minimum graduation requirements.
I wish this guy the best, but I think he's driving too hard and too fast for specialization. Even for a patent attorney, having some concept for things outside your area of interest is a good idea. That doesn't mean you need to take twelve credits of Underwater Basketweaving, just that there are a lot of things that you can learn about (particularly a big school like UVA), and it's a shame to pass up those opportunities, as they're rather difficult to come by later.
When will NeoOffice (Mac-native OOo) stop sucking so hard?
About six months after Microsoft discontinues Office for Macintosh.
Does that require that you have some extension installed? Or is it specific to the Linux version?
I'm using FF 1.0.7 on Windows (woe is me) and that option doesn't exist in the Tools menu, nor does that key combination do anything.
I was surprised as well that they declined to mention those ... baser ... guilty pleasures, which we all know the Internet is just so accomadating of.
As to the "dirty porn" question, my personal feeling is that the cost to society of censoring certain types of content are greater than the questionable benefits of not having it out there. I've never seen any really good analysis showing (with some proof of causation, not just corellation) that the availiability of internet porn has caused more real-world crime; lacking that proof I think that there's no legitimate mandate for censorship of any kind.
Personally, if I was the one in charge of regulating smut, I'd probably start by looking at pornography that promotes or exemplifies unsafe sex practices in terms of STD risk, since I have to believe that the effects of that are probably greater than the small number of individuals who are actually driven to commit crime because of porn (and wouldn't have done something anyway in its absence).
I think deviant individuals will probably always seek out whatever is taboo in their society; if it was one where porn wasn't allowed, they'd be ogling the Sears catalog. I see no reason why limiting access to particular media really changes an individual's tendency towards antisocial behavior.
This was attempted.
Back in the heady days of the late 1990s, I had one of the first MP3 players among my group of friends. It was a thing called the Pontis MPlayer3, and used MultiMediaCards for storage.
The two advertised methods for acquiring music were either ripping it on your computer and downloading it to the device (via a serial port -- oh, the pain), or buying albums on pre-flashed, read-only MultiMediaCards. I never saw any in stores, and the format seems to have gone the way of the dodo now, but at the time, Pontis and a few other manufacturers were pushing it hard.
You'd get the usual packaging and liner notes, but instead of a CD you'd just have the chip. It wasn't erasable, so unless you physically broke it, you'd have a backup forever. One of my friends who went to Germany actually bought some albums in this format, although what they were I can't tell you. I'm not sure about what DRM it had, if any; I think it must have been minimal, because the machine wasn't capable of playing back anything besides straight MP3 files. (Heck, it was picky enough about certain types of VBR joint-stereo encoding and ID3 tags.) Perhaps this contributed to the lack of titles I ever saw in the U.S.
I thought this was a neat concept; except that the player was a failure and MMC got nixed in favor of that abomination known as Secure Digital (which the Pontis wouldn't use), I think it could have had a future. As I recall, the format had some sort of cute-ish marketing name, but I can't find it now.
That was also the last time I decided to be an early adopter...
Used CDs I can understand ... but used vinyl?
That seems like buying somebody's used underwear or something. It's a consumable product. Any given record can only be played a certain number of times before it's worn out. Each time you put the stylus through the groove, it destroys a little of the information that's there.
With a CD, it either plays or it doesn't. Provided that there aren't any scratches or fingerprints or other problems with the disc, the 1,000th play will sound exactly the same as the first. Thus the value of a "virgin" CD is basically nil. However, I'd never buy a used record, particularly without knowing the source and how well they've taken care of it. How are you supposed to know what you're buying?
Now this would be different if everyone was using laser turntables, but sadly they arrived on the scene a little too late to replace mechanical styli, they're too entrenched and the economy of scale will never exist to bring down the price of contactless 'tables. Pity, too: DRM free, analog music, with the never-dimishing quality of digital. Doesn't get much better than that.
there is an inexplicable feeling that comes from the ownership of a vinyl record, rather than a cd.
It's the smell.
(sniffs record) Sweet, sweet acetate...
This is certainly a risk, but it's not an unmanageable one.
Over arbitrarily long periods, periods where an investment would have been un-profitable are exceptions rather than the rule. A well-diversified portfolio would not be at great risk of bankruptcy, barring some sort of catastrophic civilizational collapse (the sort of thing that would probably entail physical disruption of the sleeping folks anyway).
Even if you woke up in the next century's equivalent of the Great Depression, properly invested assets (including foreign currencies, real property, and precious metals and commodities) could probably give you a guarantee of at least enough funds to get on your feet. Or alternately, provide enough of an income stream to allow you to just go back to sleep for another 50 years: I have heard it said that even considering the Great Depression, the U.S. securities market has been profitable over any 50 year period.
There's always the chance that the markets will just completely tank, but given our present society and the way that it looks like it's going, that's probably right up there with global thermonuclear war on the scale of catastrophic events you can't really plan for. If it happens, you'll be one of billions of penniless people.
Excepting a few drastic scenarios, I don't think it would be hard for a person with a lot of assets to invest them in 50-year "fire and forget" chunks; the key would just be conservatism and diversification. Ultimately, the risk would just be deciding how long you think society will last.
I can't see how living for 50 years as a 70-year-old will help anyone
I can. Right now, when you think of "living...as a 70-year-old," you think of someone who may not be totally independent, or whose mental and physical faculties are dimished. In short, someone who is probably a burden to society, taking the social equivalent of a 'desk by the window' while they live out their time.
Except that even now, that's not true (heck, I know people who are still razor sharp and running marathons at 70), and future advances in medical technology will mean it's even less so. The goal of anti-aging research isn't to just let people live longer -- making that period of elderly dotage longer -- but to make a person's middle age, their productive years, longer. In short, to give people more useful life.
So at some point, I could easily see where someone could live as a 70-year-old and be a great benefit to society. They would have 70 years of learning and experience behind them, but still have the physical and mental acumen that we now associate with a 30 or 40-year-old. Those people could and would be, productive members of society. More than that, even; they would be vast repositories of experience, having lived through nearly twice what an average worker of today has probably seen.
In a world that seems to be obsessed with the short term, I could see us benefiting greatly from advances that allow people who've been around for a century or more to still be active participants in decisionmaking.
I would assume that the tradeoff for being frozen and living forever would be mandatory sterilization; if you want to live forever, then there's no need for you to have children.
I could imagine some point at which our understanding of neuroscience and neurology improves to the point where a living human brain could be transplanted from one body to another, or its contents uploaded to a new wetware container. Thus, you could have yourself repeatedly cloned and preserve your consiousness across the ages, barring accidental death. In that case, you have to look at your clones as being effectively your "children," only with your personality.
Alternately, if you decide to have children naturally, you can look at it as alternative to cloning, where you simply mix the genetic material up with somebody else's, and then don't do any of the personality or brain-transfer stuff.
Obviously allowing people to do both -- live for arbitrarily long periods and have children -- would be a recipe for disaster, unless humanity was in the process of expanding its territory. However I think people at some point could be offered the choice of extending themselves directly, or via their children.
I have never heard this, but it does make a certain amount of sense; mice certainly have no reason to be as 'optimized' for longevity as humans are.
Perhaps if we looked at animals that are more human-like in terms of reproductive strategies, we'd see some better optimizations than even we have?
I'm thinking particularly about whales; many species have only one chance at reproducing per season, due to their migration patterns, and have 12-month or longer gestations. I'm not sure how long infant whales take before they split from their mothers, but I'm betting it's significant as well. Perhaps not long enough to encourage inter-generational "families," but not the quick turnaround of animals that have litters.
Perhaps our choice of study animals is causing us to think we're making progress, when in reality we're only imitating what evolution has already done for us? Not that this is all bad, undoubtedly we'll learn lots in the process.
I tend to wonder; could a person refuse to divulge an encryption key on Fifth Amendment grounds?
It seems like this has to have happened before, so there's probably precedent on it somewhere. If you know that by revealing the key, you're going to be incriminating yourself, it seems like you might have grounds for refusal. That would keep you from being charged with contempt. That would also probably allow your spouse(s) to refuse to incriminate you, as well.
I could also see how a court could rule that an encryption key or password isn't "protected speech" though, in the same way that they've curtailed the First Amendment. IMO, I would think that the encryption key is a pretty big piece of evidence in itself, since it's the only way to show that the plaintext came from the ciphertext; thus disclosing a password or key really is testifying against oneself. Not that logic really plays any great role in modern jurisprudence, as far as I can tell.
I've seen discussions about this on sci.crypt and other places, but never a definitive answer.
You would think so, but I bet that in a lot of cases, they'd just treat your possession of the contraband as prima facie evidence of a crime.
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It's like drug possession -- if the cops toss your car and find a kilo of China White or a handgun with the serial number scratched off in the glove compartment, your insistence that it's not yours may not keep you out of trouble. Just having it, in a place that was under your control, is the crime. A demonstration of intent is not necessary. In effect, it means that the burden of proof is shifted to the defendant to explain themselves, and if they cannot provide a justification for the evidence, they're guilty.
Frankly I think "prima facie" laws in general are a travesty of justice; we ought to abolish the whole philosophy and get back to a more intent-focused jurisprudence. But of course if you tried to do that, you'd be keelhauled for being supportive of crime and criminals, because in the short term it would make the work of the police harder.
In general, a lot of "possession" laws (drug possession, weapon possession, pornography, "burglar's tools") are intentionally written this way so that a demonstration of intent is unnecessary, and many laws include the phrase "prima facie" verbatim. (See this Montana weapon law, for example.)
More information you might want to read:
http://www.lectlaw.com/def2/p078.htm (deals with torts, specifically in employment law, but discussed the general concept)
http://dictionary.law.com/default2.asp?selected=1
I RTFAed, but I still don't understand exactly how the program is going to work, where the money is going to come from, or what the controversy is about.
They call it "coin operated coding," but are they going to let users choose what work their money gets used to fund? So if I want, say, better window transparency, then I can donate $20 and he'll spend 15 or 30 minutes working on that someday? Or is it just the electronic version of one of those "money thermometers" that everyone's seen in front of their local Lion's Club / Church / Women's Auxiliary, proclaiming how close or far away donors are from a predetermined goal that will allow something to happen?
For something that's being touted as a new method of funding, it sure seems rather vaporous to me. Anyone want to fill in on exactly how it's supposed to work?
This is true.
Unfortunately, separating out the people who are smart enough and have enough foresight to use power wisely, from those who would just use it for short-term or personal gain, is a Hard Problem; if not in the mathematical sense than its equivalent in the political/social science one.
If you had a machine that could read a person's "true nature" and spit out whether they would be a responsible member of society or not, then certainly you could only allow those people to vote and we'd all be better for it. However, as no machine has yet been constructed, we cannot do this.
Failing that, the best system anyone has been able to come up with so far, relies on the other extreme: let everyone have a small say in government, and hope that there are more good and smart people than mean and stupid ones; that this works at all is a bit surprising, but yet it seems to do okay for itself, or at least better than any alternative system that has yet been tried. To quote an old cliche, 'democracy sucks, but the alternatives are worse.'
So certainly, there are a lot of idiots out there who sadly are allowed to both vote and reproduce, unfortunately this is the cost of doing business, as it were; there's no way to prevent them from doing those things, without destroying society in the process. Any system that we could practically create to weed out "idiots" would by definition be imperfect, and the result would probably be worse than where we are right now.
To a limited extent, I agree.
Neatness is one thing, but those examples just look like an advertising photo for nylon wire ties. I mean, they look nice now, but what happens when you need to move one of those connections around, say from one port to another?
You'd have to cut 50 different ties, and all the wires are cut to such precise lengths, you'd probably end up having to splice some sort of nasty extender in there (adding a significant insertion loss due to the connectors or splice). It would be a total mess. Having everything wired in drum-tight may look nice, but it's a bitch later on. Something that has more "drip loops" before all the wires get bundled up into single harnesses may not look quite as polished initially, but it's far easier to work on down the road.
I've worked on audio systems like this, and it always strikes me as something that you'd do if you were a contractor working on a one-shot job, something where you want to impress the client and justify your fee, with no real thought to maintenance later.
If you want to equate copying a bunch of bits to bribery or assault, that's fine.
However, most people don't think they're on the same level, as evidenced by the rampant amounts of technically illegal copying that goes on, and the significantly less-than-rampant amount of bribery and assault.
Lumping everything in life together under "legal" and "illegal" may be fine in elementary school, but most people don't think that way. If you think life is that black and white, congratulations and I wish you the best.
You might as well condemn people who drive 70 in a 65 MPH zone, since they're breaking the law, too; I'd go on to argue that it's probably significantly worse than copyright violation, since you can easily kill somebody by speeding, while I am going to go out on a limb and say that the number of people killed by pirated music is very low. Certainly something that has the risk of killing other people ought to be less morally defensible than a basically victimless, economic "crime." (Particularly a crime where the damages to society are nebulous at best; who's to say how much money piracy actually diverts from legitimate business and fails to recreate in other sectors of the economy?)
Until we've eliminated all the more significant forms of crime in the world, I think our effort and attention -- both in terms of moral outrage and law-enforcement resources -- would be better directed elsewhere, perhaps at the crimes that cause real physical harm to real people.
Besides, what is sulfur dioxide going to do to our lungs?
By the time you get up to the stratosphere, which is the level where they're talking about doing the sulphur-dioxide business, your lungs will have worse things to worry about than the smell.