When RIAA sued Napster, Gnutella argued invincibility because it was decentralized, and derived no benefit from the file swapping. They were playing a game of chicken when they activated central servers at all. Now, they are adding ads to the software, meaning that they gain a direct monetary benefit from the file swapping. My prediction is that we'll hear about a RIAA Limewire suit before December.
The best definition of software I can think of is this: a set of instructions for a machine to follow. With that definition both films and music are just specialized software. The real bitch will be when machines are capable of building people from subatomic particles (i.e. transporters). Then what will people be but software? It's all about the information, after all.
Your post shows a frightful amount of ignorance to the history of the United States. Believe it or not, but there was a similar debate concerning adopting the constitution and abandoning the articles of confederation. The opponents strongly feared a centralized federal government. The proponents saw the social, economic, and military benefits of strengthening the central government past the point where it had to beg the member states of the union for money (sound familiar?).
One of the problems with the United States today is that it has basically become a half-assed world governing body in which only 4% of the world's population has a direct say. We treat the rest of the world about like Great Britain treated its colonies. In case you're not familiar with mercantilism, the idea is that the mother country imports raw materials from the colonies and exports finished goods to them. Great for the country, bad for the colonies. We're even worse, though. We get raw materials and have them manufactured in foreign countries, and pay less than they're worth for them. What makes this possible is the difference between the values of different currencies (an artificial situation at best). Trade traditionally moves goods from places where the concentration is high, and thus demand is low, to areas where the concntration is low, and thus demand is high. The only thing maintaining our current situation is the fact that labor over seas is abundant enough that people are willing to work for the pittance we offer. It's an unstable situation that won't last.
So you see from the economic situation that the people of the world who don't live in the U.S. are justifiably dissatisfied with the fact that they are to some extent or another governed by the U.S. but their interests aren't being considered. Two things will stabilize this issue:
One: adopt a world currency to help level the economic iniquities.
Two: make a world government in which all people are represented. Right now all governments have representation in the UN, but not people. The powers of such a body should be:
The power to tax (all taxes must apply the same to all people [i.e. income taxes are fine, but taxing one country more than another is not fair]), raise an army, approval of all treaties, policing of seaways including regulation of ocean fisheries, regulate international commerce, run a police force with international authority, run a court system, etc.
History is riddled with convergence. Before humans, animals such as primates and wolves organized based on the family group. The family group extended to the tribes/clans/gens. Clans eventually fused in to city states, that controlled empires. Empires slowly morphed in to modern nation states. Soon, it will be time for the nation state to go the way of the dinosaur, and be replaced by a global governance.
--BlackGriffen
Re:A waste of time. Probably OEMed by someone else
on
Apple releases iPod
·
· Score: 1
"virtue of being firewire will be limited to Apple Mac owners),"
Don't you realize that both Compaq and Sony both use Firewire, they just use it under a different name? I don't recall what Compaq calls it, but Sony calls it i-Link.
BlackGriffen
I'll probably get flamed for the title alone, but hear me out. Unless Apple's hard drive supplier has made some serious advances in hard drive durability, the iPod will be nothing more than a niche market toy. I love absolutely everything else about this product, but the worry that dropping it would ruin the hard drive would keep me from using it as it shold be used. Hopefully there will be a cheap mp3 player based on Panasonic and Toshiba's SD Memory cards (that would be sweet) some time soon.
What kind of geek are you? Micron is short for micrometer. 1 one-thousandth of a micron is a nanometer. Also interesting to note is that atoms are about 1 or 2 angstroms (.1 or.2 nm), so, according to your calculations, they're running at about 13 to 25 atoms thick. 100 nanometer is between 500 and 1000 atoms thick.
BlackGriffen
-"I need to visit slashdot so I can be sure I saw yesterday's news right the first time, and get a preview of what I will see again tomorrow."
With single molecule transistors, wouldn't there be reliability concerns? After all, the uncertainty principle could wreak havoc on a circuit that is too small. Both information processing and durability would be hampered.
I thought giving the Kernel the ability to preemt other programs was important. If you give programs the ability to preempt the kernel, doesn't that just change the system back to cooperative multi-tasking? I could just see programmers abusing the ability to preempt the kernel to squeeze a little more speed out of their app.
A net like this is just an invitation to be hacked. One of the best places to hide something is in plane sight. If they make their communications look like regular internet traffic, it will be safer than otherwise (i.e. send encrypted files as jpeg, although no graphics editor could make sense of it).
"(3 minutes later, and atmosphere unexpectedly thickens)"
Problem is this: how do you detect that fast enough to do anything about it? It's not like the craft can carry a barometer, since the temperature is so high and the air is moving so fast that the bernoullie (sp?) effect would be insane. If we had a gps over mars we could have the craft track its velocity, but that aint happening any time soon.
Trust me, if rocket science were really that easy, everyone would be doing it.
BlackGriffen
Re:Aerobraking vs. Propulsion Braking
on
The Art of Aerobraking
·
· Score: 2, Informative
IIRC, Pathfinder didn't rely (solely) on a baloon deflation sequence to right itself. The craft was a tetrahedron (pyramid with 4 triangular faces), and no matter how it landed it would right itself as it opened.
Regardless of other consequences, using hydrogen fuel would also help cut down on polution around airports. Since Hydrogen burns to form water, airports would at worst be a bit steamy, instead of borderline toxic.
Hydrogen burns red, natural gas burns blue. Haven't you ever seen one of those demos where they torch a baloon with hydrogen in it. It's a deep red, though, definitly not orange...
Slashdot Mirror
When RIAA sued Napster, Gnutella argued invincibility because it was decentralized, and derived no benefit from the file swapping. They were playing a game of chicken when they activated central servers at all. Now, they are adding ads to the software, meaning that they gain a direct monetary benefit from the file swapping. My prediction is that we'll hear about a RIAA Limewire suit before December.
BlackGriffen
The best definition of software I can think of is this: a set of instructions for a machine to follow. With that definition both films and music are just specialized software. The real bitch will be when machines are capable of building people from subatomic particles (i.e. transporters). Then what will people be but software? It's all about the information, after all.
BlackGriffen
Your post shows a frightful amount of ignorance to the history of the United States. Believe it or not, but there was a similar debate concerning adopting the constitution and abandoning the articles of confederation. The opponents strongly feared a centralized federal government. The proponents saw the social, economic, and military benefits of strengthening the central government past the point where it had to beg the member states of the union for money (sound familiar?). One of the problems with the United States today is that it has basically become a half-assed world governing body in which only 4% of the world's population has a direct say. We treat the rest of the world about like Great Britain treated its colonies. In case you're not familiar with mercantilism, the idea is that the mother country imports raw materials from the colonies and exports finished goods to them. Great for the country, bad for the colonies. We're even worse, though. We get raw materials and have them manufactured in foreign countries, and pay less than they're worth for them. What makes this possible is the difference between the values of different currencies (an artificial situation at best). Trade traditionally moves goods from places where the concentration is high, and thus demand is low, to areas where the concntration is low, and thus demand is high. The only thing maintaining our current situation is the fact that labor over seas is abundant enough that people are willing to work for the pittance we offer. It's an unstable situation that won't last. So you see from the economic situation that the people of the world who don't live in the U.S. are justifiably dissatisfied with the fact that they are to some extent or another governed by the U.S. but their interests aren't being considered. Two things will stabilize this issue: One: adopt a world currency to help level the economic iniquities. Two: make a world government in which all people are represented. Right now all governments have representation in the UN, but not people. The powers of such a body should be: The power to tax (all taxes must apply the same to all people [i.e. income taxes are fine, but taxing one country more than another is not fair]), raise an army, approval of all treaties, policing of seaways including regulation of ocean fisheries, regulate international commerce, run a police force with international authority, run a court system, etc. History is riddled with convergence. Before humans, animals such as primates and wolves organized based on the family group. The family group extended to the tribes/clans/gens. Clans eventually fused in to city states, that controlled empires. Empires slowly morphed in to modern nation states. Soon, it will be time for the nation state to go the way of the dinosaur, and be replaced by a global governance. --BlackGriffen
"virtue of being firewire will be limited to Apple Mac owners)," Don't you realize that both Compaq and Sony both use Firewire, they just use it under a different name? I don't recall what Compaq calls it, but Sony calls it i-Link. BlackGriffen
I'll probably get flamed for the title alone, but hear me out. Unless Apple's hard drive supplier has made some serious advances in hard drive durability, the iPod will be nothing more than a niche market toy. I love absolutely everything else about this product, but the worry that dropping it would ruin the hard drive would keep me from using it as it shold be used. Hopefully there will be a cheap mp3 player based on Panasonic and Toshiba's SD Memory cards (that would be sweet) some time soon.
BlackGriffen
I thought that the NSA had already done this. Anyone remember Echelon? Maybe the FBI just wants permission to use it?
BlackGriffen
What kind of geek are you? Micron is short for micrometer. 1 one-thousandth of a micron is a nanometer. Also interesting to note is that atoms are about 1 or 2 angstroms (.1 or .2 nm), so, according to your calculations, they're running at about 13 to 25 atoms thick. 100 nanometer is between 500 and 1000 atoms thick.
BlackGriffen
-"I need to visit slashdot so I can be sure I saw yesterday's news right the first time, and get a preview of what I will see again tomorrow."
With single molecule transistors, wouldn't there be reliability concerns? After all, the uncertainty principle could wreak havoc on a circuit that is too small. Both information processing and durability would be hampered.
BlackGriffen
I thought giving the Kernel the ability to preemt other programs was important. If you give programs the ability to preempt the kernel, doesn't that just change the system back to cooperative multi-tasking? I could just see programmers abusing the ability to preempt the kernel to squeeze a little more speed out of their app.
A net like this is just an invitation to be hacked. One of the best places to hide something is in plane sight. If they make their communications look like regular internet traffic, it will be safer than otherwise (i.e. send encrypted files as jpeg, although no graphics editor could make sense of it).
"(3 minutes later, and atmosphere unexpectedly thickens)" Problem is this: how do you detect that fast enough to do anything about it? It's not like the craft can carry a barometer, since the temperature is so high and the air is moving so fast that the bernoullie (sp?) effect would be insane. If we had a gps over mars we could have the craft track its velocity, but that aint happening any time soon. Trust me, if rocket science were really that easy, everyone would be doing it. BlackGriffen
IIRC, Pathfinder didn't rely (solely) on a baloon deflation sequence to right itself. The craft was a tetrahedron (pyramid with 4 triangular faces), and no matter how it landed it would right itself as it opened.
BlackGriffen
Regardless of other consequences, using hydrogen fuel would also help cut down on polution around airports. Since Hydrogen burns to form water, airports would at worst be a bit steamy, instead of borderline toxic.
BlackGriffen
Even better, you can use solar cells to split water and/or natural gas in to some H2.
Hydrogen burns red, natural gas burns blue. Haven't you ever seen one of those demos where they torch a baloon with hydrogen in it. It's a deep red, though, definitly not orange...
They can do .9.9.10, .9.9.11, etc.
Never hate too long, or too deeply, because we become what we hate.