There are similarly subjective cases in patent law, though. If there weren't, then we wouldn't have the courts.
A very simlar case to your link there, the supreme court tried to determine whether a patent on using a potentiometer to get a signal for an electronic fuel injection system can be patented. As a control engineer, I'd say it's a stupid patent, there's total prior art there. The district court in their jurisdiction and the appeals court disagreed with me. The Supreme court at last decided it WAS a stupid patent on an obvious application of existing technologies.
That's just as difficult to determine as whether the Lion King was a rip-off.
They're both creative processes. There's a degree of artwork in either, and a degree of mathematical precision in either. Both rely on physics to work properly. Whether a copyrighted work is popular and whether a patent is useful are both very subjective.
You're a troll. Nobody could present arguements this terrible and be serious.
I mean, in one paragraph, you rewrite something I've written and berate me for the fallacy you introduce. In another, you stare my point right in the face, pull back your fist, squint right at it, and...and...and....miss it entirely!
I shouldn't even get started on various planetary catastrophes which have affected this very planet, killing 99% of life in a go.
It's all about demographics. Having seen both magazines, it's far more likely that Blender would be targetted at the Metallica fanbase. Thus, blender will praise Saint Anger because it's part of its mission to do so, while Rolling Stone will destroy Saint Anger, becuase it's part of IT'S mission to do so.
The use or non-use of meaningless marketing is irrelevant. I'm not making any sort of judgements as to the usefulness of such marketing tools. I'm saying that when you're choosing metrics for measuring success or failure of something, it's best to choose something other than the top 50, which was so amazingly wise as to have a techno song about being blue at #1 on Christmas morning in 1999(and has been the source of constant federal lawsuits against the recording industry), or magazines, which traditionally regardless of industry are in bed with publishers.
The simple fact that if the sun were to nova tomorrow, the universe wouldn't notice. This can be shown by the fact that stars die all the time, and given the high occurrance, it's likely another planet like earth has been devoured by a nova or supernova. Everything that you and every human has ever done will be meaningless. If our sun was just a bit bigger, it would be doubly so, becuase it would collapse into a black hole instead of a white dwarf.
More importantly, odds are you're not paying for it anyway. Republicans are in office, and they don't pay for things, they just run up debts they don't intend for this generation to pay back.
If you even THINK about raising taxes to meet spending, you're a radical left-wing liberal nutjob communist.
That was exactly my train of thought. Most media will die a terrible death after 25 years, but records tend to be ok. Thing is, since this would be stored in a box underground, I'd want it to be more resilliant, hence the digital stainless steel disk.
There's no objective standard of ethics. In order for such a standard to exist, an objective third party observer would have to exist. Such an observer likely wouldn't value the things we value.
Every value we have is a result of being human. Why is killing a human wrong, but a deer, or for that matter a tree or an insect, ok? Because we're humans, and that's how our morality is defined. Why is stealing from another person bad, but stealing the honey from a beehive ok? Because we're humans, and that's how our morality is defined. Why is it ok to have a dog as a pet, but not a human as a pet? Because we're human, and that's how our morality is defined.
Ethics are just rationalizations. You start with a basic human value and start rationalising. It's proper rationalising, it's based on logic and reason, but your first principles are still whims of genetics and society.
Yeah, all the good Imanuel Kant's ethics did him, now he's dead and we're not.
(Honestly though, ethics are just a high-level justification for behavioural tendancies and emotional programming that is a result of genetics. We believe the things we do becuase we're human. We believe in the right and wrong we believe in becuase we're human. There is no objective truth to any ethical truth we present, beyond "because that's how humans act")
It's a matter of risk. If you're going to store something in a SINGLE location for 25 years, and you've only got one shot at it, you overdesign the hell out of that medium, so it should last 10,000 years if everything goes perfectly, because then it might just be able to stand a chance of lasting 25 years if something goes wrong.
I'm immediately thinking of the car they left in a bunker. It rusted all to hell becuase water got in. That same water would decimate a DVD, but a stainless steel disk may stand a chance of retaining some data.
If the data is important, and you're only storing it in one place, and you've only got one shot, you don't go with "It should be ok". You go with "This takes all the most likely problems into account and if everything goes good it should last 100 years, and if something goes wrong, it'll probably STILL be retrievable in 25"
It seems like overkill at first, but you've got to plan for the contingencies that current standards are as hard to find a player for as 8-tracks, that there may be a paradigm shift in the way computers are used, and that there may be water leakage. Remember the car they put away for 25 years which came out destroyed because water made it in? No problem with this.
Magazines that are paid to give good reviews of albums don't count. Neither are payola based "top 100" boards. Both are meaningless marketing machines.
All things artistic are subjective. That's just the nature of the beast. If you've got an idea, however, it's better to work on that idea than on the details around it. If I want to create a fantasy story, I can create a whole slew of new races, or I can go with elves, gnomes, dwarves, etc etc etc. If I've got an idea for a bunch of new races, sure I can go with it, but if I don't, and it's not that relevant to the story I want to tell, then why bother developing a whole half-assed world? It's the same as Disney creating half-assed stories for their movies. It's obvious they don't want to deal with those, they've got other things that are more interesting and they've got better ideas in those other areas.
You can argue that they didn't improve the original works(BTW, there were multiple authors they used, not just the brothers grimm) in the ways you were hoping for, but you can't argue that what they created wasn't something which became very special to a lot of people, and they obviously created something innovative for the time, despite being based off of public domain works -- which is why it flew off the shelves and made the company one of the largest media companies in the world, and the company which indirectly created manga, when Japanese people decided to emulate Disney's style.
You joke, but I think the best solution would be a macro scale physical recording medium. I wouldn't trust magnetism over 25 years, I wouldn't trust microscopic silicon SRAM for 25 years, and I know for a fact that CDRs deteriorate after about 10 years.
I think the best would be a large stainless steel disk. On the disk, at certain intervals, would be impressions. Each impression would be one of 4 depths of a relatively large difference in height, maybe 2mm. Each depth would represent an octet. Each height difference would be a square milimeter or so. The disk should store about 1000kb for each meter of disk size with both sides used.
Stamped on the middle of the disk would be instructions for reading the disk: What height represents what octet, which way the disk rotates, whether the disk starts at the front or the back. I'd guess the best thing to use would be a laser time domain reflectometer to acquire the data, which could be read one-bit at a time into whatever sort of PC exists in the future. There would be information detailing how to determine the beginning and end of the disk, and at least a reference to whatever graphics standards you use to save the image.
The disk should sit in a vacuum-filled glass case. The glass case should have rubber legs, and the disk itself, being relatively massive, should have rubber legs too. If there's room, a reference telling how to program a reader for the disk and a reader for the graphics standards you've used would be best too.
The pictures should be saved as one massive image on each side of the disk, and that's all that should be on the disk. There shouldn't be a table of contents, only a header and a footer. This will reduce complexity and ensure the person retrieving the data doesn't have to find a 50 year old copy of MS-DOS to run the 25 year old disk.
Doing all this would prevent rust from degenerating the data, it would prevent magnetic fields from disrupting the data, it would prevent subtle chemical changes in the disk from disrupting the data, it would prevent particulate matter from disrupting the data, it would prevent complicated and antiquated drive mechanisms from preventing easy retrieval of the data, it would prevent incompatible future operating systems from causing the data to be unretrievable, it would prevent unknown file formats from causing the data to be unretrievable.
I figure the only thing that could cause real trouble would be if someone made a serious effort to destroy the data surface. Dust could cake the data, but it should be cleanable. As long as there's someone capable of building a reader aparatus (you could include one, but don't depend on it interfacing with anything anybody understands -- let alone working after 25 years), there shouldn't be any hardware issues.
I'm a bit worried about the data density, but that's just the way she goes. A milimeter is a nice macro scale so you don't have to worry about quantum effects damaging the disk, and stainless steel wouldn't rust, but there's a chance of read errors if someone scrapes the disk. Parity mechanisms could be used, but that'd cut the size of the disk substantially in order to provide error correction.
I'm not sure density would be a good trait. The problem is, the denser your fluid, the more difficult it will be for convection currents to carry the heated fluid away.
I was thinking of ethanol. It's got about half the heat capacity of water, but it's a non-electrolyte and non-conductive.
Why couldn't you just fill a tank with Ethanol and dunk your PC in there? It's a non-electrolyte, it has a relatively high specific heat (twice that of air, half that of water), it's non-conductive, it absorbs water, what's the problem?
Besides the fact that it burns pretty well. That's obvious.
That's a really cool piece of information. I wish the wikipedia article had more information. How was the lung trauma caused? What is "an extended period"?
Parallax and stereoscopy won't give you 3d information. There is no depth field. You've got two 2d images from which 3d information can be speculated, but no 3d information.
This technique sounds like it would give you two arrays: The first array would be a colour map, the second array would be a height map. This would be done basically by taking the image without any flash, which would have no distance cues based on distance from the flash lens, and comparing it to the image with flash, which would be lit in such a way that the brightness will fall off at a square of the distance. Having both pictures, and having physics, will let you create a distance map. Then use the first picture, and apply it as a skin over the distance-map created by the second, and you've got something you didn't have before: a true 3d image, which you should be able to rotate and look at. You won't be able to see behind the object or anything insane like that, but you could concievably take two pictures of someone's face, and get a 3d snapshot of the face which would require only small changes to look normal.
We call spending all your budget creating things from scratch "re-inventing the wheel". It's almost universally considered a bad thing. By spending all your time, effort, and money re-creating something relatively generic that has already been done, something called "Not Invented Here", you reduce the time, effort, and money you can spend innovating or paying attention to important parts.
Patents work becuase when they expire, people can expand upon them, often creating new, better works which are then patented. The internal combustion engine, as it was first patented, was a terrible thing, using oil soaked ropes as piston rings, and it was said "You need three mines to own a otto motor: One to pay for it, one to feed it, and the one you're using it in". The company was making good money and had a monopoly on the production of the motor, so they had no incentive to improve it. After the patent expired, many companies went to work creating better versions of the internal combustion engine, and today we've got an amazing, small, inexpensive, mobile engine.
Similarly, Disney took works that had already fallen into the public domain, and improved them using THEIR best innovations, which involved taking an existing story from literature and making them look and sound amazing. They didn't have to re-invent compelling stories (and when they tried with other movies, the end product was much worse for the effort), so they could focus on other elements. Those titles are all classics, and unlike "song of the south" or some of their other original movies, their works based on public domain literature are still very popular.
I have definitely observed that contemporary works which can build upon previous works tend to be better than works that come from the ether. Family Guy, for example, is owned by Fox, and as a result has a massive amount of copyrighted material it's allowed to reference without dealing with copyright lawsuits. It's constantly using that older material in new and innovative ways. The thing is, they can't just steal blatantly because it's not interesting unless there's a new innovation in there somewhere. Other TV shows need to create the same ideas from scratch, or the same ideas tweaked by lawyers to not infringe.
It's not a new idea. Newton said "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
Slashdot Mirror
There are similarly subjective cases in patent law, though. If there weren't, then we wouldn't have the courts.
A very simlar case to your link there, the supreme court tried to determine whether a patent on using a potentiometer to get a signal for an electronic fuel injection system can be patented. As a control engineer, I'd say it's a stupid patent, there's total prior art there. The district court in their jurisdiction and the appeals court disagreed with me. The Supreme court at last decided it WAS a stupid patent on an obvious application of existing technologies.
That's just as difficult to determine as whether the Lion King was a rip-off.
They're both creative processes. There's a degree of artwork in either, and a degree of mathematical precision in either. Both rely on physics to work properly. Whether a copyrighted work is popular and whether a patent is useful are both very subjective.
You're a troll. Nobody could present arguements this terrible and be serious.
I mean, in one paragraph, you rewrite something I've written and berate me for the fallacy you introduce. In another, you stare my point right in the face, pull back your fist, squint right at it, and...and...and....miss it entirely!
I shouldn't even get started on various planetary catastrophes which have affected this very planet, killing 99% of life in a go.
It's all about demographics. Having seen both magazines, it's far more likely that Blender would be targetted at the Metallica fanbase. Thus, blender will praise Saint Anger because it's part of its mission to do so, while Rolling Stone will destroy Saint Anger, becuase it's part of IT'S mission to do so.
The use or non-use of meaningless marketing is irrelevant. I'm not making any sort of judgements as to the usefulness of such marketing tools. I'm saying that when you're choosing metrics for measuring success or failure of something, it's best to choose something other than the top 50, which was so amazingly wise as to have a techno song about being blue at #1 on Christmas morning in 1999(and has been the source of constant federal lawsuits against the recording industry), or magazines, which traditionally regardless of industry are in bed with publishers.
The simple fact that if the sun were to nova tomorrow, the universe wouldn't notice. This can be shown by the fact that stars die all the time, and given the high occurrance, it's likely another planet like earth has been devoured by a nova or supernova. Everything that you and every human has ever done will be meaningless. If our sun was just a bit bigger, it would be doubly so, becuase it would collapse into a black hole instead of a white dwarf.
More importantly, odds are you're not paying for it anyway. Republicans are in office, and they don't pay for things, they just run up debts they don't intend for this generation to pay back.
If you even THINK about raising taxes to meet spending, you're a radical left-wing liberal nutjob communist.
That was exactly my train of thought. Most media will die a terrible death after 25 years, but records tend to be ok. Thing is, since this would be stored in a box underground, I'd want it to be more resilliant, hence the digital stainless steel disk.
There's no objective standard of ethics. In order for such a standard to exist, an objective third party observer would have to exist. Such an observer likely wouldn't value the things we value.
Every value we have is a result of being human. Why is killing a human wrong, but a deer, or for that matter a tree or an insect, ok? Because we're humans, and that's how our morality is defined. Why is stealing from another person bad, but stealing the honey from a beehive ok? Because we're humans, and that's how our morality is defined. Why is it ok to have a dog as a pet, but not a human as a pet? Because we're human, and that's how our morality is defined.
Ethics are just rationalizations. You start with a basic human value and start rationalising. It's proper rationalising, it's based on logic and reason, but your first principles are still whims of genetics and society.
No he doesn't. You know why? He's dead.
Yeah, all the good Imanuel Kant's ethics did him, now he's dead and we're not.
(Honestly though, ethics are just a high-level justification for behavioural tendancies and emotional programming that is a result of genetics. We believe the things we do becuase we're human. We believe in the right and wrong we believe in becuase we're human. There is no objective truth to any ethical truth we present, beyond "because that's how humans act")
OH YEAH! You totally SCHOOLED that guy!
Terrorist fist pound that shit! (raises fist)
To be fair, it really could look a lot different to troops on the ground.
Quantum Physics has many fathers. Classical physics is a bit of a slut.
Wouldn't that only help things? You'd need to top up your alcohol reservoirs, but the change to vapour would remove heat from the liquid, right?
There are fields other than computer science.
It's a matter of risk. If you're going to store something in a SINGLE location for 25 years, and you've only got one shot at it, you overdesign the hell out of that medium, so it should last 10,000 years if everything goes perfectly, because then it might just be able to stand a chance of lasting 25 years if something goes wrong.
I'm immediately thinking of the car they left in a bunker. It rusted all to hell becuase water got in. That same water would decimate a DVD, but a stainless steel disk may stand a chance of retaining some data.
It's a matter of risk.
If the data is important, and you're only storing it in one place, and you've only got one shot, you don't go with "It should be ok". You go with "This takes all the most likely problems into account and if everything goes good it should last 100 years, and if something goes wrong, it'll probably STILL be retrievable in 25"
It seems like overkill at first, but you've got to plan for the contingencies that current standards are as hard to find a player for as 8-tracks, that there may be a paradigm shift in the way computers are used, and that there may be water leakage. Remember the car they put away for 25 years which came out destroyed because water made it in? No problem with this.
Magazines that are paid to give good reviews of albums don't count. Neither are payola based "top 100" boards. Both are meaningless marketing machines.
All things artistic are subjective. That's just the nature of the beast. If you've got an idea, however, it's better to work on that idea than on the details around it. If I want to create a fantasy story, I can create a whole slew of new races, or I can go with elves, gnomes, dwarves, etc etc etc. If I've got an idea for a bunch of new races, sure I can go with it, but if I don't, and it's not that relevant to the story I want to tell, then why bother developing a whole half-assed world? It's the same as Disney creating half-assed stories for their movies. It's obvious they don't want to deal with those, they've got other things that are more interesting and they've got better ideas in those other areas.
You can argue that they didn't improve the original works(BTW, there were multiple authors they used, not just the brothers grimm) in the ways you were hoping for, but you can't argue that what they created wasn't something which became very special to a lot of people, and they obviously created something innovative for the time, despite being based off of public domain works -- which is why it flew off the shelves and made the company one of the largest media companies in the world, and the company which indirectly created manga, when Japanese people decided to emulate Disney's style.
You joke, but I think the best solution would be a macro scale physical recording medium. I wouldn't trust magnetism over 25 years, I wouldn't trust microscopic silicon SRAM for 25 years, and I know for a fact that CDRs deteriorate after about 10 years.
I think the best would be a large stainless steel disk. On the disk, at certain intervals, would be impressions. Each impression would be one of 4 depths of a relatively large difference in height, maybe 2mm. Each depth would represent an octet. Each height difference would be a square milimeter or so. The disk should store about 1000kb for each meter of disk size with both sides used.
Stamped on the middle of the disk would be instructions for reading the disk: What height represents what octet, which way the disk rotates, whether the disk starts at the front or the back. I'd guess the best thing to use would be a laser time domain reflectometer to acquire the data, which could be read one-bit at a time into whatever sort of PC exists in the future. There would be information detailing how to determine the beginning and end of the disk, and at least a reference to whatever graphics standards you use to save the image.
The disk should sit in a vacuum-filled glass case. The glass case should have rubber legs, and the disk itself, being relatively massive, should have rubber legs too. If there's room, a reference telling how to program a reader for the disk and a reader for the graphics standards you've used would be best too.
The pictures should be saved as one massive image on each side of the disk, and that's all that should be on the disk. There shouldn't be a table of contents, only a header and a footer. This will reduce complexity and ensure the person retrieving the data doesn't have to find a 50 year old copy of MS-DOS to run the 25 year old disk.
Doing all this would prevent rust from degenerating the data, it would prevent magnetic fields from disrupting the data, it would prevent subtle chemical changes in the disk from disrupting the data, it would prevent particulate matter from disrupting the data, it would prevent complicated and antiquated drive mechanisms from preventing easy retrieval of the data, it would prevent incompatible future operating systems from causing the data to be unretrievable, it would prevent unknown file formats from causing the data to be unretrievable.
I figure the only thing that could cause real trouble would be if someone made a serious effort to destroy the data surface. Dust could cake the data, but it should be cleanable. As long as there's someone capable of building a reader aparatus (you could include one, but don't depend on it interfacing with anything anybody understands -- let alone working after 25 years), there shouldn't be any hardware issues.
I'm a bit worried about the data density, but that's just the way she goes. A milimeter is a nice macro scale so you don't have to worry about quantum effects damaging the disk, and stainless steel wouldn't rust, but there's a chance of read errors if someone scrapes the disk. Parity mechanisms could be used, but that'd cut the size of the disk substantially in order to provide error correction.
We don't know; it's still in beta.
Maybe they got it backwards and they're talking about GigaKelvin?
I'm not sure density would be a good trait. The problem is, the denser your fluid, the more difficult it will be for convection currents to carry the heated fluid away.
I was thinking of ethanol. It's got about half the heat capacity of water, but it's a non-electrolyte and non-conductive.
Why couldn't you just fill a tank with Ethanol and dunk your PC in there? It's a non-electrolyte, it has a relatively high specific heat (twice that of air, half that of water), it's non-conductive, it absorbs water, what's the problem?
Besides the fact that it burns pretty well. That's obvious.
That's a really cool piece of information. I wish the wikipedia article had more information. How was the lung trauma caused? What is "an extended period"?
Here's my take on it:
Parallax and stereoscopy won't give you 3d information. There is no depth field. You've got two 2d images from which 3d information can be speculated, but no 3d information.
This technique sounds like it would give you two arrays: The first array would be a colour map, the second array would be a height map. This would be done basically by taking the image without any flash, which would have no distance cues based on distance from the flash lens, and comparing it to the image with flash, which would be lit in such a way that the brightness will fall off at a square of the distance. Having both pictures, and having physics, will let you create a distance map. Then use the first picture, and apply it as a skin over the distance-map created by the second, and you've got something you didn't have before: a true 3d image, which you should be able to rotate and look at. You won't be able to see behind the object or anything insane like that, but you could concievably take two pictures of someone's face, and get a 3d snapshot of the face which would require only small changes to look normal.
It's obvious you're not an engineer.
We call spending all your budget creating things from scratch "re-inventing the wheel". It's almost universally considered a bad thing. By spending all your time, effort, and money re-creating something relatively generic that has already been done, something called "Not Invented Here", you reduce the time, effort, and money you can spend innovating or paying attention to important parts.
Patents work becuase when they expire, people can expand upon them, often creating new, better works which are then patented. The internal combustion engine, as it was first patented, was a terrible thing, using oil soaked ropes as piston rings, and it was said "You need three mines to own a otto motor: One to pay for it, one to feed it, and the one you're using it in". The company was making good money and had a monopoly on the production of the motor, so they had no incentive to improve it. After the patent expired, many companies went to work creating better versions of the internal combustion engine, and today we've got an amazing, small, inexpensive, mobile engine.
Similarly, Disney took works that had already fallen into the public domain, and improved them using THEIR best innovations, which involved taking an existing story from literature and making them look and sound amazing. They didn't have to re-invent compelling stories (and when they tried with other movies, the end product was much worse for the effort), so they could focus on other elements. Those titles are all classics, and unlike "song of the south" or some of their other original movies, their works based on public domain literature are still very popular.
I have definitely observed that contemporary works which can build upon previous works tend to be better than works that come from the ether. Family Guy, for example, is owned by Fox, and as a result has a massive amount of copyrighted material it's allowed to reference without dealing with copyright lawsuits. It's constantly using that older material in new and innovative ways. The thing is, they can't just steal blatantly because it's not interesting unless there's a new innovation in there somewhere. Other TV shows need to create the same ideas from scratch, or the same ideas tweaked by lawyers to not infringe.
It's not a new idea. Newton said "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."