since they are not actually processing the signal digitally. They are slickly converting it to a light signal, doing the heavy lifting with optical elements, which is essentially analog processing, and then converting it back to a digital signal. A real valuable short cut for those applications where you can translate what needs to be done to optical elements, but not anything like a general-purpose tera-ops digital computer.
The 'NSync demographic is the one that is least likely to be able to employ circumvention technology. But I want this test to be a dismal failure--so someone is going to have to bite the bullet and buy the CD so the "songs" can get on the file sharing services ASAP. Unless they are already there...
It's obvious enough that a lot of different people did implement it as soon as the underlying technology (disk storage, image compression) was available cheaply enough. This patent just applies digital storage to what was a well-understood concept of tape delay. I don't think anyone would have had trouble coming up with how to do this without searching the patent files for ideas.
Unfortunately, a successful reactor would spit out a lot of neutrons, which would tend to make the containment vessel highly radioactive over time. You'd still get a lot of nuclear waste, although perhaps not as much as with a fission reactor.
Ok, these are real papers in real journals. People are still getting some interesting results, even when they are doing things very carefully. But small amounts of power from a deuterium/palladium solution getting anodized (or cathodized?) on copper is at least as far away from a practical energy source as the tokamaks. And there are a range of possible explanations for any power excess; fusion is one of them, but there are serious theoretical problems.
I used to think cold-fusion was bunk, but I now think that it is a good idea that a few people keep looking at this (there might be some interesting chemistry or physics even if there is no miracle power source). Although there is certainly no reason yet to think of spending a lot of money on it.
In particular, an intellligent comment would suggest an alternative approach to patent-protected technologies that would still address the concerns that motivated the proposal in the first place.
Say there is a web technology that is in the process of becoming a de facto standard, but which is also protected by patents. How can W3C address such a technology to make it as accessible as possible? Remember, if technology makes W3C irrelevant, W3C won't do any good at all as a standards body and won't be able to make anything open.
I think the best we might hope for is some sort of mandatory limited free license for RAND patents used in not-for-profit or research development.
Having the consumer electronics folks against this is good, since they have a well-funded lobby (though it may not be as influential as the MPAA). That's what will slow down this kind of bad legislation.
The best way to keep the consumer electronics folks on the right side of this is consumer education: if we geeks can inform the masses about content controls and convince them that they should avoid devices that contain them it could stiffen the consumer electronics manufacturers resistance. DVD enthusiasts made Divx smell like dogsh*t to the masses and prevented it from being widely adopted. But the manufacturers will only resists content controls for as long as they think it will cost them money.
It's not uncopyable because the song title and artist don't show up. It's uncopyable because the track directory information is unavailable (or odd-looking) to the computer so the computer does not think it is an audio CD. The question is if this can be got around in the player software or only by changing the CD-ROM firmware.
Are the MP3s that they let users download watermarked? Will they actually go after a user if "their" watermarked MP3 showed up in a file-sharing service? Or is just the threat important?
To do anything like teleportation, you would need to entangle all the quantum states of all the atoms. Here they entangled 1 quantum state that was averaged over all the atoms. This is quite a bit easier; some may even call it cheating. It means that even though you have "macroscopic" entanglement, you don't have "more" entanglement than if you had simply entangled two individual particles. It is an interesting experiment nevertheless, since it shows how some degree of entanglement can be achieved over populations of particles. Even though no pair of cesium atoms in the two samples was entangled on its own, the population was entangled when you averaged their states.
As far as "practical" uses of entanglement (encryption, computation) this is an incremental advance at best.
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I suppose there might be a handful. A small handful. Not "a fair number".
since they are not actually processing the signal digitally. They are slickly converting it to a light signal, doing the heavy lifting with optical elements, which is essentially analog processing, and then converting it back to a digital signal. A real valuable short cut for those applications where you can translate what needs to be done to optical elements, but not anything like a general-purpose tera-ops digital computer.
The 'NSync demographic is the one that is least likely to be able to employ circumvention technology. But I want this test to be a dismal failure--so someone is going to have to bite the bullet and buy the CD so the "songs" can get on the file sharing services ASAP. Unless they are already there...
and this was an obvious application.
Except the patent holder did not market the device.
It's obvious enough that a lot of different people did implement it as soon as the underlying technology (disk storage, image compression) was available cheaply enough. This patent just applies digital storage to what was a well-understood concept of tape delay. I don't think anyone would have had trouble coming up with how to do this without searching the patent files for ideas.
Unfortunately, a successful reactor would spit out a lot of neutrons, which would tend to make the containment vessel highly radioactive over time. You'd still get a lot of nuclear waste, although perhaps not as much as with a fission reactor.
Ok, these are real papers in real journals. People are still getting some interesting results, even when they are doing things very carefully. But small amounts of power from a deuterium/palladium solution getting anodized (or cathodized?) on copper is at least as far away from a practical energy source as the tokamaks. And there are a range of possible explanations for any power excess; fusion is one of them, but there are serious theoretical problems. I used to think cold-fusion was bunk, but I now think that it is a good idea that a few people keep looking at this (there might be some interesting chemistry or physics even if there is no miracle power source). Although there is certainly no reason yet to think of spending a lot of money on it.
In particular, an intellligent comment would suggest an alternative approach to patent-protected technologies that would still address the concerns that motivated the proposal in the first place.
Say there is a web technology that is in the process of becoming a de facto standard, but which is also protected by patents. How can W3C address such a technology to make it as accessible as possible? Remember, if technology makes W3C irrelevant, W3C won't do any good at all as a standards body and won't be able to make anything open.
I think the best we might hope for is some sort of mandatory limited free license for RAND patents used in not-for-profit or research development.
Having the consumer electronics folks against this is good, since they have a well-funded lobby (though it may not be as influential as the MPAA). That's what will slow down this kind of bad legislation. The best way to keep the consumer electronics folks on the right side of this is consumer education: if we geeks can inform the masses about content controls and convince them that they should avoid devices that contain them it could stiffen the consumer electronics manufacturers resistance. DVD enthusiasts made Divx smell like dogsh*t to the masses and prevented it from being widely adopted. But the manufacturers will only resists content controls for as long as they think it will cost them money.
Microsoft's DVR Ultimate TV has a second tuner (and I think maybe a third on some models.)
If it's ReplayTV, the purchase price includes the channel guide service (you dial in to it) in perpetuity.
It's not uncopyable because the song title and artist don't show up. It's uncopyable because the track directory information is unavailable (or odd-looking) to the computer so the computer does not think it is an audio CD. The question is if this can be got around in the player software or only by changing the CD-ROM firmware.
Are the MP3s that they let users download watermarked? Will they actually go after a user if "their" watermarked MP3 showed up in a file-sharing service? Or is just the threat important?
To do anything like teleportation, you would need to entangle all the quantum states of all the atoms. Here they entangled 1 quantum state that was averaged over all the atoms. This is quite a bit easier; some may even call it cheating. It means that even though you have "macroscopic" entanglement, you don't have "more" entanglement than if you had simply entangled two individual particles. It is an interesting experiment nevertheless, since it shows how some degree of entanglement can be achieved over populations of particles. Even though no pair of cesium atoms in the two samples was entangled on its own, the population was entangled when you averaged their states. As far as "practical" uses of entanglement (encryption, computation) this is an incremental advance at best.