The post was a reply to spyinnzus's question (about the robot variant of the puzzle). If you found the original page using Google, you might enjoy following the links from there to some of my other puzzles.
Gur gbhevfg yvrq, naq jnf ernyyl tbvat gb Vgrebcbyvf. Fur jnf noyr gb qrqhpr gung gur svefg ebobg jnf gryyvat gur gehgu, naq gung ure gehr qrfgvangvba jnf gurersber gb gur yrsg, ba gur ebnq gur ebobgf unq orra geniryvat.
Gur xrl vf gur svefg ebobg'f frpbaq fgngrzrag ("Vs lbh nfxrq zr, V'q fnl Ovgobebhtu vf gb gur evtug"). Vs gur svefg ebobg vf n gehgu-gryyre, guvf fgngrzrag pna or npprcgrq ng snpr inyhr: Ovgobebhtu vf gb gur evtug. Vs gur svefg ebobg vf n yvne, ubjrire, gur fgngrzrag zhfg or n yvr; ohg jung vf gur yvr nobhg va guvf pnfr? N pnershy ernqvat fubjf gung vg pbapreaf ubj gur ebobg jbhyq nafjre n qverpg dhrfgvba nobhg gur ybpngvba bs Ovgobebhtu. Vs gur gehr ybpngvba bs Ovgobebhtu vf gb gur evtug, n ebobg gung yvrf jbhyq fnl "gb gur yrsg." Vs gur ebobg yvrf nobhg jung vg jbhyq fnl, vg jvyy fnl "gb gur evtug." Guhf gur npghny ybpngvba bs Ovgobebhtu zhfg or gb gur evtug va nal pnfr.
Fvapr Ovgobebhtu vf gb gur evtug, naq gur frpbaq ebobg qverpgyl pbagenqvpgf guvf, gur frpbaq ebobg zhfg or n yvne. Gurersber gur frpbaq ebobg'f svefg fgngrzrag ("Gung bar'f n yvne") vf snyfr, naq gur svefg ebobg vf n gehgu-gryyre. Guhf gur svefg ebobg'f svefg fgngrzrag ("Jr'ir whfg pbzr sebz Vgrebcbyvf") zhfg or gehr.
Q: Did you know they are serving free beer in the village of Life?
A truth-teller will say "no", and head to the village of Life. An honest liar will say "yes", and head to the village of Life. A cunning liar will say "yes", and may lead you to the village of Life -- or not, in which case you can still claim victory since the liar will be haunted by the suspicion that he or she may have missed out on the free beer.
Hint for the variant involving the robots: Tourists don't always tell the truth!
One more variant, also due to Gardner or one of his readers: Suppose that you speak the local language (shared by truth-tellers and liars) perfectly, except you have forgotten if "pish" means yes and "tush" means no, or vice versa, and that your question must be in a form that requires a yes/no (well, pish/tush) answer.
In a slightly different guise, Martin Gardner discussed this in the Scientific American many years ago. As he usually did, he later published comments from his readers, one of whom pointed out that there are liars who tell the opposite of the truth ("honest liars"), and liars whose intent is to deceive ("cunning liars"). A cunning liar would discern the intent of the question and would give an answer calculated to mislead. If you don't know which type of liars you might meet, the reader suggested the question, "Did you know they are serving free beer in the village [of life]?"
Here's a twist on that problem:
The planet Pfooey is inhabited by robots. Half of the robots always tell the truth, but the other half have been affected by a bug in their software that causes them to lie at all times. All of the robots look exactly alike, so it can be confusing to figure out which robots are truth-tellers and which are liars.
One day, a visitor to Pfooey stopped at a fork in the road. Two robots approached the tourist from the road on the left. The tourist said, "I'm on my way to Bitborough. Which road should I take?"
One of the robots replied, "We've just come from Iteropolis. If you asked me, I'd say Bitborough is to the right." The other robot pointed to the first and said, "That one's a liar. Bitborough is to the left." The tourist thanked the robots, then continued on the road to the left until she reached her destination a short time later.
The CNN story is accompanied by a "Quickvote" poll, which asks "Should the FBI be able to look at the library records of people they suspect of terrorism?" Perhaps not surprisingly, almost half of the replies favor this idea. Of course, the point under dispute is if the FBI (or anyone else) should be able to sift through library records of people they don't (yet) suspect of terrorism.
If Eli Lilly (or any other for-profit research sponsor) allows its scientists to publish, it will do so because it anticipates a benefit from doing so. The benefit might be publicity, or goodwill, or simply making it easier to attract and retain highly competent scientists.
Those of us in academia also publish in the expectation of a benefit from doing so. Whether we do so for altruistic reasons, or for tenure, or in hopes of attracting the attention of the MacArthur Foundation, doesn't matter -- we publish to make our work known.
Academics and industry scientists have the same interests -- to the extent that we are able to publish our work, we would like it to be read widely, the more widely the better. Eli Lilly will likely keep the secrets of the next Prozac secret... but if they have anything they want to publicize, they will want more publicity, not less, and if they can have more by using the CC license, they will use it.
I think you meant "author pays" (although commonly publication costs are paid from the grant that funds the research, or from the authors' institution(s)).
For years, journals have imposed "page charges" to defray part of the publication costs; PLOS and others recover essentially all of the costs from their authors (but since most or all of their distribution is electronic, their costs are lower than for traditional print journals). Their authors' fees are higher than typical "page charges" since they have no income from subscribers.
I might actually end up making _less_ profit on it, because of that extra (and let's be quite clear) unfair $10 fee that you're talking about levying because you believe it would in some way be more fair.
Hang on, a minute, there... did I use the word "fair" at all? I only said that zero was a
reasonable royalty for use of patented algorithms
in free software. Disagree with that, if you
want to.
It looks like you've described what's wrong with
your business model pretty well. Perhaps, since
you're more interested in that than I am, you might want to consider what business models would
succeed if free software developers didn't need
to worry about software patents.
Oh, yeah, 'cause everyone wants to buy consumer electronics devices that they have to put together themselves and install software on to make them work.
Of course, "everyone" doesn't want that. "Everyone" doesn't want to throw away last week's
gadget to get this week's new feature, either.
I said I didn't care about proprietary software, but
I'll bite anyway.
You've added an extra quantum of "their IP" to your
first product, increasing your manufacturing cost
by zero, and you want to charge an extra $100 for
that and that alone... and you're complaining
about having to pay an extra $20 in royalties in
order to get an extra $80 in net profit. You're
right, it is a ridiculous idea to allow
this -- probably we should forbid whining, too.
But you always have options. For example, you
could sell just the hardware, and make the
software available for free. If your product
uses hardware MPEG decoders, you could sell them
as add-ons to a basic unit, so that royalties
are paid on the selling prices of the add-ons.
A recent discussion on Groklaw included the idea of
mandating that royalties on use of patented software must be based on a percentage of the sales
price. Any percentage of zero is a reasonable
amount to pay for including patented algorithms in
free software. I couldn't care less what impact
this
might have on proprietary software makers; let
them all sue each other into oblivion if that's
what they do best.
That page also cautions that the DVD+RW and the Intel PRO wireless options are not supported by SuSE Linux. You can save another US$50 by choosing "no wireless", or pay an extra $25 to get a supported wireless option (which, unlike the default 802.11b only, also supports 802.11a and g, or so they say).
After playing around with the options a bit, it looks to me like the price range for a Linux-equipped nx5000 is US$1120 to US$3530 (of which almost half is for the second GB of RAM); a nicely configured version with the 1400x1050 display option, a 60 GB drive, 512 MB of RAM, 24X DVD/CD-RW, and 802.11a/b/g would cost US$1605.
Per-page charges are common in many journals.
Some impose them uniformly, others charge only for
pages above some threshold. Sometimes the charges
are voluntary. It is common for research grants
to include funds to defray publication expenses.
As for IP, however, it makes no difference who pays
the page charges -- generally speaking, the author
(or the author's employer) signs over copyrights
to the publisher of the journal. Those reproduction
fees you see at the bottom of the first page of
every IEEE Transactions paper go to the IEEE, not
to anyone else. The authors don't get a cent.
The parent comment was obviously written by someone
who has never reviewed scientific papers!
I frequently review papers in my field for a
variety of IEEE and other journals. I do so
because, as an author in those same journals,
I appreciate how others who review my papers
help to make them better. Peer review, believe
it or not, is done by volunteers for mostly
altruistic reasons. Journal editors are often
also volunteers.
The phone/GPS is inside of a sealed 12-pack, so inspecting individual cans would not be possible. But the moment of inertia of a can full of liquid will differ from the moment of inertia of a solid object of the same size, shape, and density, and this might (theoretically) allow the unopened case containing the phone to be identified.
For example, you could embed each case to be tested in an incompressible homogeneous cylinder and roll them down a slope. The cylinder that rolls most rapidly would be the one containing the smallest amount of liquid (all other things being equal). (You can buy incompressible homogeneous cylinders on eBay from the same folks who sell the massless springs and the frictionless pulleys.)
A (very, very, slightly) more practical approach is to suspend each case from a rope and start it swinging. All other things being equal, the pendulum that swings longest has the smallest amount of liquid (since the kinetic energy lost to sloshing is minimized). Of course, all other things won't be equal, so this would actually be a Pointless Waste of Time (TM).
A variation on the pendulum idea is to twist and release the suspended case rather than swinging it. A torsion pendulum such as this may give just enough extra sensitivity to make the difference. And it requires less space (more time though, so it would qualify as a Pointless Waste of More Time (TM)).
You could, if sufficiently motivated, test any of these ideas by freezing a can of soda and returning it to its case.
Of course, all of this assumes that you actually want an SUV. If you'd rather just have a Coke, then buy one of the cases that stops swinging first, and you should have no worries. Cheers!
The AT was IBM's third PC. The first one was, well, the PC (8088-based, no hard drive, one or two 5.25" 360Kb floppies). The second one was the PC/XT -- a PC with a small hard drive (5 or 10 Mb), which AFAIK was the first one to run UNIX (version 6), without memory management. The PC/AT had an 80286 and a 10 or 20 Mb hard drive.
Re:Interesting, but probably Inaccurate
on
Draw!
·
· Score: 1
Solving ten thousand problems is a task that is
likely to be I/O bound. The match currently
underway is a better way to demonstrate a
difference in raw CPU performance, if a
significant difference exists.
... and it's certainly more interesting to see
the games than to count how many milliseconds are
needed to solve each of 10,000 chess problems, at
least if chess is interesting to you at all!
Sending a Mindstorms robot to the ISS should be fun and inspirational -- but I'd like to take the idea a step further.
I've often wondered if/how the ISS crew will be able to reconfigure their own environment. Almost anywhere else, if you're a long way from home/Radio Shack/Home Depot and might need to build stuff for yourself, you'd want to have a machine shop... but that's probably not a realistic possibility up there. So why shouldn't the ISS be stocked with enough Legos and K'nex to build whatever the residents need?
Slashdot Mirror
As an alternative to headsets, have you considered directional speakers such as sound domes (http://www.browninnovations.com/sound_domes.html)?
The post was a reply to spyinnzus's question (about the robot variant of the puzzle). If you found the original page using Google, you might enjoy following the links from there to some of my other puzzles.
Gur gbhevfg yvrq, naq jnf ernyyl tbvat gb Vgrebcbyvf. Fur jnf noyr gb qrqhpr gung gur svefg ebobg jnf gryyvat gur gehgu, naq gung ure gehr qrfgvangvba jnf gurersber gb gur yrsg, ba gur ebnq gur ebobgf unq orra geniryvat.
Gur xrl vf gur svefg ebobg'f frpbaq fgngrzrag ("Vs lbh nfxrq zr, V'q fnl Ovgobebhtu vf gb gur evtug"). Vs gur svefg ebobg vf n gehgu-gryyre, guvf fgngrzrag pna or npprcgrq ng snpr inyhr: Ovgobebhtu vf gb gur evtug. Vs gur svefg ebobg vf n yvne, ubjrire, gur fgngrzrag zhfg or n yvr; ohg jung vf gur yvr nobhg va guvf pnfr? N pnershy ernqvat fubjf gung vg pbapreaf ubj gur ebobg jbhyq nafjre n qverpg dhrfgvba nobhg gur ybpngvba bs Ovgobebhtu. Vs gur gehr ybpngvba bs Ovgobebhtu vf gb gur evtug, n ebobg gung yvrf jbhyq fnl "gb gur yrsg." Vs gur ebobg yvrf nobhg jung vg jbhyq fnl, vg jvyy fnl "gb gur evtug." Guhf gur npghny ybpngvba bs Ovgobebhtu zhfg or gb gur evtug va nal pnfr.
Fvapr Ovgobebhtu vf gb gur evtug, naq gur frpbaq ebobg qverpgyl pbagenqvpgf guvf, gur frpbaq ebobg zhfg or n yvne. Gurersber gur frpbaq ebobg'f svefg fgngrzrag ("Gung bar'f n yvne") vf snyfr, naq gur svefg ebobg vf n gehgu-gryyre. Guhf gur svefg ebobg'f svefg fgngrzrag ("Jr'ir whfg pbzr sebz Vgrebcbyvf") zhfg or gehr.
Q: Did you know they are serving free beer in the village of Life?
A truth-teller will say "no", and head to the village of Life. An
honest liar will say "yes", and head to the village of Life. A cunning
liar will say "yes", and may lead you to the village of Life -- or not,
in which case you can still claim victory since the liar will be haunted
by the suspicion that he or she may have missed out on the free beer.
Hint for the variant involving the robots:
Tourists don't always tell the truth!
One more variant, also due to Gardner or one of his readers: Suppose
that you speak the local language (shared by truth-tellers and liars)
perfectly, except you have forgotten if "pish" means yes and "tush"
means no, or vice versa, and that your question must be in a form
that requires a yes/no (well, pish/tush) answer.
In a slightly different guise, Martin Gardner discussed this in the Scientific American many years ago. As he usually did, he later published comments from his readers, one of whom pointed out that there are liars who tell the opposite of the truth ("honest liars"), and liars whose intent is to deceive ("cunning liars"). A cunning liar would discern the intent of the question and would give an answer calculated to mislead. If you don't know which type of liars you might meet, the reader suggested the question, "Did you know they are serving free beer in the village [of life]?"
Here's a twist on that problem:
The planet Pfooey is inhabited by robots. Half of the robots always tell the truth, but the other half have been affected by a bug in their software that causes them to lie at all times. All of the robots look exactly alike, so it can be confusing to figure out which robots are truth-tellers and which are liars.
One day, a visitor to Pfooey stopped at a fork in the road. Two robots approached the tourist from the road on the left. The tourist said, "I'm on my way to Bitborough. Which road should I take?"
One of the robots replied, "We've just come from Iteropolis. If you asked me, I'd say Bitborough is to the right." The other robot pointed to the first and said, "That one's a liar. Bitborough is to the left." The tourist thanked the robots, then continued on the road to the left until she reached her destination a short time later.
How did the tourist figure out which way to turn?
The CNN story is accompanied by a "Quickvote" poll, which asks "Should the FBI be able to look at the library records of people they suspect of terrorism?" Perhaps not surprisingly, almost half of the replies favor this idea. Of course, the point under dispute is if the FBI (or anyone else) should be able to sift through library records of people they don't (yet) suspect of terrorism.
Have I missed something, or is NS8 a Windows-only browser?
If Eli Lilly (or any other for-profit research sponsor) allows its scientists to publish, it will do so because it anticipates a benefit from doing so. The benefit might be publicity, or goodwill, or simply making it easier to attract and retain highly competent scientists.
... but if they have anything they want to publicize, they will want more publicity, not less, and if they can have more by using the CC license, they will use it.
Those of us in academia also publish in the expectation of a benefit from doing so. Whether we do so for altruistic reasons, or for tenure, or in hopes of attracting the attention of the MacArthur Foundation, doesn't matter -- we publish to make our work known.
Academics and industry scientists have the same interests -- to the extent that we are able to publish our work, we would like it to be read widely, the more widely the better. Eli Lilly will likely keep the secrets of the next Prozac secret
I think you meant "author pays" (although commonly publication costs are paid from the grant that funds the research, or from the authors' institution(s)).
For years, journals have imposed "page charges" to defray part of the publication costs; PLOS and others recover essentially all of the costs from their authors (but since most or all of their distribution is electronic, their costs are lower than for traditional print journals). Their authors' fees are higher than typical "page charges" since they have no income from subscribers.
AFAIK this is universal. Similar rules apply in the UK, where Crown copyright is retained in publications from publicly funded research.
Hang on, a minute, there ... did I use the word "fair" at all? I only said that zero was a
reasonable royalty for use of patented algorithms
in free software. Disagree with that, if you
want to.
It looks like you've described what's wrong with your business model pretty well. Perhaps, since you're more interested in that than I am, you might want to consider what business models would succeed if free software developers didn't need to worry about software patents.
Oh, yeah, 'cause everyone wants to buy consumer electronics devices that they have to put together themselves and install software on to make them work.
Of course, "everyone" doesn't want that. "Everyone" doesn't want to throw away last week's gadget to get this week's new feature, either.
You've added an extra quantum of "their IP" to your first product, increasing your manufacturing cost by zero, and you want to charge an extra $100 for that and that alone ... and you're complaining
about having to pay an extra $20 in royalties in
order to get an extra $80 in net profit. You're
right, it is a ridiculous idea to allow
this -- probably we should forbid whining, too.
But you always have options. For example, you could sell just the hardware, and make the software available for free. If your product uses hardware MPEG decoders, you could sell them as add-ons to a basic unit, so that royalties are paid on the selling prices of the add-ons.
A recent discussion on Groklaw included the idea of mandating that royalties on use of patented software must be based on a percentage of the sales price. Any percentage of zero is a reasonable amount to pay for including patented algorithms in free software. I couldn't care less what impact this might have on proprietary software makers; let them all sue each other into oblivion if that's what they do best.
I tried this, too ... and then tried "linux nx5000". That actually seems to work -- at least, the first hit brought me to a configuration page (http://h71016.www7.hp.com/dstore/MiddleFrame.asp? page=config&ProductLineId=430&FamilyId=1776&BaseId =11024&oi=E9CED&BEID=19701&SBLID=&AirTime=Fals e that let me choose SuSE Linux (this reduces the price by US$50 relative to the default XP Pro).
That page also cautions that the DVD+RW and the Intel PRO wireless options are not supported by SuSE Linux. You can save another US$50 by choosing "no wireless", or pay an extra $25 to get a supported wireless option (which, unlike the default 802.11b only, also supports 802.11a and g, or so they say).
After playing around with the options a bit, it looks to me like the price range for a Linux-equipped nx5000 is US$1120 to US$3530 (of which almost half is for the second GB of RAM); a nicely configured version with the 1400x1050 display option, a 60 GB drive, 512 MB of RAM, 24X DVD/CD-RW, and 802.11a/b/g would cost US$1605.
As for IP, however, it makes no difference who pays the page charges -- generally speaking, the author (or the author's employer) signs over copyrights to the publisher of the journal. Those reproduction fees you see at the bottom of the first page of every IEEE Transactions paper go to the IEEE, not to anyone else. The authors don't get a cent.
I frequently review papers in my field for a variety of IEEE and other journals. I do so because, as an author in those same journals, I appreciate how others who review my papers help to make them better. Peer review, believe it or not, is done by volunteers for mostly altruistic reasons. Journal editors are often also volunteers.
The phone/GPS is inside of a sealed 12-pack, so inspecting individual cans would not be possible. But the moment of inertia of a can full of liquid will differ from the moment of inertia of a solid object of the same size, shape, and density, and this might (theoretically) allow the unopened case containing the phone to be identified.
For example, you could embed each case to be tested in an incompressible homogeneous cylinder and roll them down a slope. The cylinder that rolls most rapidly would be the one containing the smallest amount of liquid (all other things being equal). (You can buy incompressible homogeneous cylinders on eBay from the same folks who sell the massless springs and the frictionless pulleys.)
A (very, very, slightly) more practical approach is to suspend each case from a rope and start it swinging. All other things being equal, the pendulum that swings longest has the smallest amount of liquid (since the kinetic energy lost to sloshing is minimized). Of course, all other things won't be equal, so this would actually be a Pointless Waste of Time (TM).
A variation on the pendulum idea is to twist and release the suspended case rather than swinging it. A torsion pendulum such as this may give just enough extra sensitivity to make the difference. And it requires less space (more time though, so it would qualify as a Pointless Waste of More Time (TM)).
You could, if sufficiently motivated, test any of these ideas by freezing a can of soda and returning it to its case.
Of course, all of this assumes that you actually want an SUV. If you'd rather just have a Coke, then buy one of the cases that stops swinging first, and you should have no worries. Cheers!
His cello concerto is one of my favorites.
... there's another Dvorak?
Oh
Off-topic but I'll keep it short:
The AT was IBM's third PC. The first one was, well,
the PC (8088-based, no hard drive, one or two 5.25"
360Kb floppies). The second one was the PC/XT -- a
PC with a small hard drive (5 or 10 Mb), which AFAIK
was the first one to run UNIX (version 6), without
memory management. The PC/AT had an 80286 and a 10
or 20 Mb hard drive.
I've often wondered if/how the ISS crew will be able to reconfigure their own environment. Almost anywhere else, if you're a long way from home/Radio Shack/Home Depot and might need to build stuff for yourself, you'd want to have a machine shop ... but that's probably not a realistic possibility up there. So why shouldn't the ISS be stocked with enough Legos and K'nex to build whatever the residents need?
You can never have too many Legos.