Hey, just a question, are you aware of anyone who has continued this research beyond the "hey, look, it can walk!" stage? Like, has anyone actually gotten any results that suggest intelligent reasoning is going on? I can imagine that if you gave each unit energy and enabled one unit to eat another that you'd at least get fighting or hunting behaviours, but I've never actually seen someone do this.. is it just that grad students don't have that much processing power at their disposal?
in the computer industry.. and yes, the fact that this stuff isn't actually available to buy yet means it aint coming out of the lab. Why? Cause it takes people who are willing to accept risk to turn research into products and not every grad student is into taking risks with their life.
Cause it's a vague and undefined threat. Maybe when the earth is totally fucked people will be willing to spend more on fixing it, but until then you have no hope of getting everyone to pull together.. What you might have a chance of doing is convincing governments to do something about it. Thus the Kyoto treaty. Unfortunately just passively reducing emissions is not going to fix the problem, especially when the biggest producer of carbon emissions refuses to sign. The reason they won't sign is that they see it as a limiting factor on industry; whereas, if we were doing something active instead of just passive, like building a large CO2 processor, or hell, yes, planting trees, the US would be more than willing to sign as it would be considered a pretty pork belly project to dangle in front of their campaign contributors.
Excuse me, but what the *fuck* has the law of thermodynamics got to do with this? It's a fossil fuel, it has stored energy which we are releasing.. this isn't a closed system we're talking about here. Jesus man.
Yeah, I saw An Inconvenient Truth lately. It was a classic failure of salesmanship: the closing. The whole movie presents a bleak picture of the future of global warming. It shows that the problem is real, that is caused by us and that we need to do something about it. Unfortunately, it then goes on to present a "solution" that involves everyone on the planet changing their behaviour or, at least, everyone in the US and China. I walked out of the theatre thinking "greatest problem in the history of mankind and all we've got to fix it is a bunch of fuckin' hippies." Low emission cars are a great idea, but unless they're mandated people are going to continue buying the cheaper cars that are not low emission. The atmosphere is the ultimate "commons".. and our society has no respect for the commons.
So what's the solution? Big artificial carbon converters. It would be terribly inefficient to plant another billion trees, and that's what the planet needs to handle all the carbon that modern human activity spews into the air. So let's make our own carbon converters. 2CO2 + energy -> C2 + 2O2.. it's really not complicated. Even if we were to get all the energy for that equation by burning coal or oil, we'd still be able to keep the carbon in the atmosphere at acceptable levels.. but using nuclear or solar or wind power is a better idea.
Thing is though, who is going to pay for all these carbon converters? Who's going to pay for the power to run then when they are built? Well, we are; that is to say, the government will. To make that happen we need three things:
A working prototype.
A solid plan for deployment with costing, etc.
The political will to make it happen.
Getting the first two is what us scientist and engineer types are for.. getting the last one is the kind of thing Gore is trying to do.. unfortunately, he's trying to do it without the first two. The typical human response to a crisis with no solution is to ignore it. People can't call for "action" if they can't even imagine what that action would be.
Sigh. Most of these score programs use custom fonts. Custom fonts are copyright. You cannot distribute anything that is rendered in a custom font without permission from the creator of that font. Microsoft Word, on the other hand, uses Microsoft fonts, which come with a license that says you are free to distribute works rendered with those fonts but you are not permitted to distribute the fonts for use in third party software. If you use a custom font to add text to an image in Photoshop then you are bound by the license of that custom font when distributing the image you create. I dunno what you people don't understand about this, it's really not that hard.
Calling singing/playing an instrument work is insulting to people who do real work for a living. You might as well claim that professional surfers work. Oh, it's so hard, have you ever tried it? Just because it takes effort, doesn't mean its work.
Like Shakespeare's plays, classics such as French onion soup would belong to everybody. But a chef who came up with a new soup could copyright it and demand a licensing fee from anybody else who served it.
God I hope that happens. Know why? Cause if the chef has to pay a licensing fee, that means the customer is going to have to pay a licensing fee, and that means this fancy new soup must be more expensive than the "classics". Game over. Crazy shit eh. Is this the end of capitalism? Is this it? Copyright is the profit motive take to its logical extreme.. you can't do anything without "rewarding" the dude who thought of what you are doing first (and don't give me that crap about this being how patents work not copyright, when it comes to trivial shit like recipes, it truly is a case of copyrighting ideas). We can only hope.
I'm sorry, are you actually trying to argue in favour of speed limits, "no sampling" and parking fees? Are you crazy? All three are arbitary laws introduced by people who 1) don't know when to stay out of other people's business 2) are greedy SOBs trying to make unfair revenue. The point of "no sampling" is to force people to "buy before you try". It's much like the "no refunds" policy that typically follows it. The purpose of speed limits and parking fees is to make money off motorists much like toll bridges. But I suppose you're a fan of toll bridges. Explains why you don't mind copyright,, it's basically a toll on culture.
That's cool, thanks. I suggested they use a paint program simply because something like you suggested is probably a LOT too hard for most musicians to use.. so they're likely to be tempted to use a proprietary program, which despite what the people who replied to my original post will tell you, often do make claims on their output.. for example, they often use custom fonts, which are copyrighted, and therefore you don't have the right to redistribute works written using those fonts.
Let me repeat what I said below up here: we're not talking about songwriters. The vast majority of "recording artists" are not songwriters. Bach composed, he didn't just play other people's stuff.
Well, what we were talking about was recording artists. Not song writers. Ya know, the people who get in front of a microphone once a year or so, hammer out a few tunes and then collect royalties for the next 150-200 years? Yeah, those guys.
Basically what you just said was: can't we make an automatic process to turn a non-machine-readable document into a machine-readable document. And the answer almost always is: no, we can't. But I've got a better idea. Instead of OCR, let's just scan 1% of the document into an image. That's fair use right? Ok, so now lets set up a website where we show that 1% to budding young musicians and get them to play it with their midi hardware. Once 10 people have played the same piece of music, let's compare the results. The most uncommon result we'll drop, the rest we'll average together. Ok, now throw away that 1% of the document and scan in another 1%. Eventually we'll get the whole piece.
Meh. Why not support local musicians? Ya know, people you can actually see and talk to. Copyright is just stupid, really really stupid. Imagine we could infinitely and cheaply copy food. We all had a kitchen in a box and we could download recipes from the Internet for it. No-one seems to mind that people copy recipes - they're not covered by copyright even. So now I'm imagining the chefs of the world getting mad that they're not getting a cut of people translating their recipes from books into Autocooker format. People used to buy their books cause they were really handy to have on a shelf in the kitchen, but now that a lot of people have got Autocookers they want digital recipes and once its digital people have a tendancy to share it more than they did when it was in dead tree format. The fact that now people with no cooking skills can sample some famous chef's food and will more than likely seek out that famous chef's restraunt and pay for a meal where before they wouldn't have, that's quietly ignored. The chefs form together into an alliance and lobby governments to extend copyright to cover recipes, just like the "recording artists" lobbied the government to extend copyright to cover audio recordings. Marketing takes over, and instead of what tastes good to you, everyone now wants to eat whatever their friends are eating. DRM protected recipes are sold by Apple. Techniques to circumvent DRM are outlawed. DRM is mandated. The price of Autocookers actually goes up when it should be going down. People all over the world continue to starve because, although Autocookers could solve world hunger they threaten the status quo.
BTW, it's really annoying that I have to revert to science fiction to get across my point. Copyright on sound recordings is a relatively modern thing. Isn't it fair for society to be able to throw out something that we don't want anymore? It's not like you can claim that it's been this way for thousands of years. It was a nice experiment, the result is a restriction on speech, freedom and culture, let's move on!
How much money doest the artist make per song sold via AllOfMp3.com?
Who gives a shit? Seriously. Stop calling them "artists", they're not, they're musicians. Singing for a crust is not work. They have no divine right to be rich and famous. Jesus, this phenomona, the so-called "recording artist" is not even 100 years old. It was good while it lasted, but now it's over.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, just a question, are you aware of anyone who has continued this research beyond the "hey, look, it can walk!" stage? Like, has anyone actually gotten any results that suggest intelligent reasoning is going on? I can imagine that if you gave each unit energy and enabled one unit to eat another that you'd at least get fighting or hunting behaviours, but I've never actually seen someone do this.. is it just that grad students don't have that much processing power at their disposal?
Sounds like government, not individual, action to me.
in the computer industry.. and yes, the fact that this stuff isn't actually available to buy yet means it aint coming out of the lab. Why? Cause it takes people who are willing to accept risk to turn research into products and not every grad student is into taking risks with their life.
Cause it's a vague and undefined threat. Maybe when the earth is totally fucked people will be willing to spend more on fixing it, but until then you have no hope of getting everyone to pull together.. What you might have a chance of doing is convincing governments to do something about it. Thus the Kyoto treaty. Unfortunately just passively reducing emissions is not going to fix the problem, especially when the biggest producer of carbon emissions refuses to sign. The reason they won't sign is that they see it as a limiting factor on industry; whereas, if we were doing something active instead of just passive, like building a large CO2 processor, or hell, yes, planting trees, the US would be more than willing to sign as it would be considered a pretty pork belly project to dangle in front of their campaign contributors.
Yeah, here's the equation for failure:
x * everyone = solution, where x is small
whereas here's the equation for actually getting things done:
x * everyone + government = solution, where x is taxes.
and this only necessary because this equation doesn't work:
x * market segment - cost(solution) = profit, where x is something that market segment is willing to pay.
If we could figure out how to make that equation work the problem would be solved already, unfortunately this equation is working best right now:
x * ignorant people - cost(!solution) = profit
and there's just no way to educate all the people in that group because they too are profiting.
It was on Slashdot, how low profile is that?
Because billions of trees will cost more than 100s of artificial converters and the energy needed to power those converters.
Excuse me, but what the *fuck* has the law of thermodynamics got to do with this? It's a fossil fuel, it has stored energy which we are releasing.. this isn't a closed system we're talking about here. Jesus man.
So what's the solution? Big artificial carbon converters. It would be terribly inefficient to plant another billion trees, and that's what the planet needs to handle all the carbon that modern human activity spews into the air. So let's make our own carbon converters. 2CO2 + energy -> C2 + 2O2.. it's really not complicated. Even if we were to get all the energy for that equation by burning coal or oil, we'd still be able to keep the carbon in the atmosphere at acceptable levels.. but using nuclear or solar or wind power is a better idea.
Thing is though, who is going to pay for all these carbon converters? Who's going to pay for the power to run then when they are built? Well, we are; that is to say, the government will. To make that happen we need three things:
Getting the first two is what us scientist and engineer types are for.. getting the last one is the kind of thing Gore is trying to do.. unfortunately, he's trying to do it without the first two. The typical human response to a crisis with no solution is to ignore it. People can't call for "action" if they can't even imagine what that action would be.
Well, you're just guessing and I've actually read the license, and they do, so shut the fuck up already.
Sigh. Most of these score programs use custom fonts. Custom fonts are copyright. You cannot distribute anything that is rendered in a custom font without permission from the creator of that font. Microsoft Word, on the other hand, uses Microsoft fonts, which come with a license that says you are free to distribute works rendered with those fonts but you are not permitted to distribute the fonts for use in third party software. If you use a custom font to add text to an image in Photoshop then you are bound by the license of that custom font when distributing the image you create. I dunno what you people don't understand about this, it's really not that hard.
Yeah, that is sad. Too bad their goal isn't to make people happy, or to refine their craft.
Reverse engineering of food is about as practical as reverse engineering of software.
Thanks for showing how ignorant you are on both.
Calling singing/playing an instrument work is insulting to people who do real work for a living. You might as well claim that professional surfers work. Oh, it's so hard, have you ever tried it? Just because it takes effort, doesn't mean its work.
Anyone who gets their legal advice from Slashdot deserves everything they get. Get off your high horse.
Like Shakespeare's plays, classics such as French onion soup would belong to everybody. But a chef who came up with a new soup could copyright it and demand a licensing fee from anybody else who served it.
God I hope that happens. Know why? Cause if the chef has to pay a licensing fee, that means the customer is going to have to pay a licensing fee, and that means this fancy new soup must be more expensive than the "classics". Game over. Crazy shit eh. Is this the end of capitalism? Is this it? Copyright is the profit motive take to its logical extreme.. you can't do anything without "rewarding" the dude who thought of what you are doing first (and don't give me that crap about this being how patents work not copyright, when it comes to trivial shit like recipes, it truly is a case of copyrighting ideas). We can only hope.
I'm sorry, are you actually trying to argue in favour of speed limits, "no sampling" and parking fees? Are you crazy? All three are arbitary laws introduced by people who 1) don't know when to stay out of other people's business 2) are greedy SOBs trying to make unfair revenue. The point of "no sampling" is to force people to "buy before you try". It's much like the "no refunds" policy that typically follows it. The purpose of speed limits and parking fees is to make money off motorists much like toll bridges. But I suppose you're a fan of toll bridges. Explains why you don't mind copyright,, it's basically a toll on culture.
That's cool, thanks. I suggested they use a paint program simply because something like you suggested is probably a LOT too hard for most musicians to use.. so they're likely to be tempted to use a proprietary program, which despite what the people who replied to my original post will tell you, often do make claims on their output.. for example, they often use custom fonts, which are copyrighted, and therefore you don't have the right to redistribute works written using those fonts.
Nah, he's just like every other Microsoft employee, totally ignorant of things that ain't happening inside Microsoft. It's a sheltered culture.
Let me repeat what I said below up here: we're not talking about songwriters. The vast majority of "recording artists" are not songwriters. Bach composed, he didn't just play other people's stuff.
Well, what we were talking about was recording artists. Not song writers. Ya know, the people who get in front of a microphone once a year or so, hammer out a few tunes and then collect royalties for the next 150-200 years? Yeah, those guys.
If you don't like it, don't read the site dickhead.
Basically what you just said was: can't we make an automatic process to turn a non-machine-readable document into a machine-readable document. And the answer almost always is: no, we can't. But I've got a better idea. Instead of OCR, let's just scan 1% of the document into an image. That's fair use right? Ok, so now lets set up a website where we show that 1% to budding young musicians and get them to play it with their midi hardware. Once 10 people have played the same piece of music, let's compare the results. The most uncommon result we'll drop, the rest we'll average together. Ok, now throw away that 1% of the document and scan in another 1%. Eventually we'll get the whole piece.
Meh. Why not support local musicians? Ya know, people you can actually see and talk to. Copyright is just stupid, really really stupid. Imagine we could infinitely and cheaply copy food. We all had a kitchen in a box and we could download recipes from the Internet for it. No-one seems to mind that people copy recipes - they're not covered by copyright even. So now I'm imagining the chefs of the world getting mad that they're not getting a cut of people translating their recipes from books into Autocooker format. People used to buy their books cause they were really handy to have on a shelf in the kitchen, but now that a lot of people have got Autocookers they want digital recipes and once its digital people have a tendancy to share it more than they did when it was in dead tree format. The fact that now people with no cooking skills can sample some famous chef's food and will more than likely seek out that famous chef's restraunt and pay for a meal where before they wouldn't have, that's quietly ignored. The chefs form together into an alliance and lobby governments to extend copyright to cover recipes, just like the "recording artists" lobbied the government to extend copyright to cover audio recordings. Marketing takes over, and instead of what tastes good to you, everyone now wants to eat whatever their friends are eating. DRM protected recipes are sold by Apple. Techniques to circumvent DRM are outlawed. DRM is mandated. The price of Autocookers actually goes up when it should be going down. People all over the world continue to starve because, although Autocookers could solve world hunger they threaten the status quo.
BTW, it's really annoying that I have to revert to science fiction to get across my point. Copyright on sound recordings is a relatively modern thing. Isn't it fair for society to be able to throw out something that we don't want anymore? It's not like you can claim that it's been this way for thousands of years. It was a nice experiment, the result is a restriction on speech, freedom and culture, let's move on!
How much money doest the artist make per song sold via AllOfMp3.com?
Who gives a shit? Seriously. Stop calling them "artists", they're not, they're musicians. Singing for a crust is not work. They have no divine right to be rich and famous. Jesus, this phenomona, the so-called "recording artist" is not even 100 years old. It was good while it lasted, but now it's over.