what happens when the Segway reaches it maximum speed?
It doesn't.
It is programatically speed-limited so it always has enough reserve speed to beat your attempt to lean forward.
Ever do judo? There's a move called okuri ashi harai (sending foot sweep), in which you get a person moving in one direction, then sweep his feet out in that same direction. By moving his feet forward, past his center of gravity, you make him fall over backwards even though he's still moving forwards. The fall feels a little bit like sliding into home base.
That's what the Segway does, but with the intent of moving your feet back under your center of gravity.
Remember, unless you're accelerating, you're not going to actually be leaning your center of mass in front of your feet, or you'd be falling over. You just have your body configuration like you'd be leaning forward if you were standing on the ground, but when it accelerated, the Segway rotated the base you're standing on so you became balanced once more.
And in any balance situation, it always keeps enough acceleration potential to kick your feet back under you (and as far in front of you as it needs to slow you down or stop you), no matter how hard you (as a mere human) try to throw yourself in front of your feet.
"Let's not kid ourselves." A.K.A. "If it won't cost too many votes, we can do it." Details of metalaw may shift the balance between opposing factions, but they aren't going to matter if everybody's basically on the same side.
But seriously, that tired theory about how you don't really need a driver's license unless you're using the road for commercial purposes is nonsense. It's a crackpot's delusion that sounds just weird enough to seem true.
By default, riding a mindless motor vehicle "over the public easement" is reckless endangerment of other travellers. It's entirely consistent with the common law to place strict limitations, including the requirement of a license, on this kind of behavior, and generally treat it as a privilege.
As a public hazard by default, you don't need to claim the status of driving a vehicle to be restricted, you just have to do it.
In fact, she's taken a context (copying an A paper to get a good grade) where there is no moral way to copy!
Do you think that was unintentional?
It's actually quite a good match to their general strategy: expressing the importance of obedience to the restrictions of authority in terms of the feelings of the originator.
Does someone else copying your paper without your consent (in and of itself) hurt you? No, but it's against the rules and it might offend you if you heard about it. It's against the rules even if it doesn't offend you, in fact even if you give permission and want it to be done (assuming regular school rules).
Does making a copy of a CD (in and of itself) hurt the artists? No, but it's against the rules and it might offend them if they heard about it. It's against the rules even if it doesn't offend them, in fact even if they give permission and want it to be done (assuming regular recording contracts).
It's not meant to persuade logical people who think about it carefully, it's a soundbite for people who don't want to think about it.
Anyway, this isn't a legal argument, it's an appeal to emotion: "This thing which involves copying information produced by the artist upsets the artist. Would you like it if someone did a thing which involved copy produced by you which upsets you?" There is a consistent theme: that copying information without the producer's consent is wrong.
They (the distributors) know perfectly well that they can't make copying impossible, so they are doing everything possible to make it inconvenient and make people not want to do it.
People know they should pay the artist, that it's the right thing to do. The distributors' strategy then is to make them equate "paying the artist" with "buying the CD." It's their only choice, really; if they even admitted there are other ways of paying the artist that don't require the distributors at all, such as a busking model, they'd be cutting their own throats.
If your argument against them consists of pointing out the logical flaws in their argument, you'll just end up looking like a nitpicker to anyone who doesn't already agree with you completely. If you really want to help promote the move away from obsolete, expensive distribution systems, it would be better to point out other ways to support the artists.
"This looks interesting, I'll just try their free evaluation version..." "Ugh... they want my email address... Yeah, you send your spam to nobody@notme.com" "Damn it, these spammy bastards mail you the access codes. [sigh] Okay, here's my real address..." "A FEW MORE HOURS?!" "Okay, Kazaa, where's the full version?"
Maybe, but I don't like their revenue model.
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WineX 2.0
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· Score: 2
Money now, product later? No doubt these particular guys are honest, but it doesn't give them a whopping big incentive to do their best work as quickly as possible.
Realistically, people are signing up mainly to support them, i.e. donating. Why on Earth should they say, "If you want to donate, this is the amount you must give. We won't take less, and we're not interested in more." ?
I still don't understand why so few open source software projects are taking voluntary payments. It seems like the perfect match: "We give you the software with no obligation, you pay us whatever you like to encourage more work."
As far as I know, there are no eletrolytic organisms or other natural process to get the O2 back, so we are screwed.
Photosynthesis takes CO2, H2O, and sunlight to produce carbohydrates.
However, new CO2 goes into the air, spreads out more or less evenly, and its precious carbon becomes available to plants around the world. So carbon balances itself pretty quickly, and you have to really work at releasing it faster than plants can suck it up. New H2O vapor mostly falls in the ocean (or winds up there, eventually), where there's plenty of the stuff already, and doesn't promote new plant growth. So there's not much reason to believe that hydrogen will balance itself out naturally.
You mean "carbohydrates" wasn't just chosen to sound neat? I thought plants got all their component atoms from carbon dioxide and trace minerals in the groundwater, and only used water as a medium!
In all seriousness, though, I think the extra water would pretty much end up in the ocean and not significantly encourage plant growth (unlike increased supplies of available carbon). Neither would the reduction in free oxygen, that I can see. There's no guarantee that the ecosystem will naturally balance a sufficiently huge influx of some active element in a way that doesn't kill some of the more sophisticated and sensitive forms of life (such as mammals).
We'd have to burn an awful lot of the stuff to make a difference, but who knows? Maybe it will be worrisome in a thousand years, and we'll have to start actively breaking down some carbonate rock to balance things out.
Cheap, high-speed internet is great for web surfing, and ideally suited to it. You get your content loaded right away (fast) and then your connection sits idle while you use it (cheap).
It was always designed for that kind of use. However, it wasn't sold that way. As you say, they push high-quality streaming video and similar nonsense that uses 100% of your bandwidth for extended periods. Worse, they just assumed people wouldn't find any use for the free bandwidth during the supposed "idle" periods.
Sure enough, everybody and his dog is finding some way to suck it up with high-bandwidth games or P2P systems. That "it'll just work out somehow" attitude, basing feasibility on unfounded assumptions, was the main mental illness of the e-business boom and bust.
These bandwidth limits should always have been a part of the system. They should even have been part of the advertising, the way they are for the server market. "20 GB/month, burstable at 1MB/second!"
Of course, they shouldn't bill for bandwidth unexpectedly. They should just throttle the connection down to a harmless speed, and then give the user the option to buy more bandwidth.
I said, "The reduced demand will drive prices up higher," but I meant the reduced use would drive up both price tolerance and the need to make more money for value delivered. Basically, the same way arcade game prices crept up from quarters to dollars as fewer people used them less often.
Also, for those of you with sigs turned off (I forget you can do that), my sig links to buskpay.com.
This illustrates the "micropayment" fallacy nicely
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Life on The Net in 2004
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· Score: 4, Interesting
People who support micropayments usually claim that they'll be so small that you won't notice them, much less care about them. Nice dream, but it doesn't take into account the motivations of the people involved.
When people set their mandatory micropayment prices, they'll do it to maximize profit. The prices will find and sit at the awareness threshold of users, so you'll look up and see you've spent $5 over the course of a few minutes without really noticing it. People will respond to this by thinking of internet use as an expensive activity, and keeping it to a minimum. The reduced demand will drive prices up higher.
That's a natural consequence of each entity setting the prices of what their selling. Information doesn't compete on price very well. I forget who said it... "Information wants to be free, because it's so easy to distribute, yet information wants to be expensive, because it's so useful." When the people owning the information set the price, they can make it expensive, because it takes a fairly high price before it's better than not having the information.
However, voluntary micropayments don't have this tendency, being set by the users. Ultimately, I think voluntary payments will win out in any area with a sufficiently clued-in audience to make it work. The competitive advantages of free information are obviously huge, so wherever they can make enough profit to develop a comparable product to the restricted information, they'll win. Also, voluntary micropayments are much simpler and cheaper to implement.
I've written a bit on the kind of systems that would be needed (and can fairly easily be developed) to replace intellectual property restrictions, and I've done some work developing parts of them (see my sig).
It starts off with: Bad Astronomy: "That's as remote as the dark side of the Moon!" Good astronomy: "That's as remote as the far side of the Moon!"
...then goes on to complain about popular song lyrics and generally whine about the fact that anyone has ever used the expression "dark side of the moon."
It finishes with: "The Pink Floyd album may be one of the best selling albums of all time, but astronomically it's in eclipse."
It contains no claim about people being mistaught that one side of the moon is always dark, just a baseless assumption that the expression must be interpreted that way. And it fails as an educational resource by missing a good reason to call the far side the "dark side."
It's obnoxious "ha ha!" nitpicking, but worse for being built on bad reasoning. If it was isolated, I wouldn't have bothered, but it's not the only example on the site: take this, for example. This page doesn't even make sense: Bad Astronomy: The Moon appears larger on the horizon than overhead because you are comparing it to foreground objects. Good astronomy: The Moon does appear larger on the horizon, but it is because of the way we perceive the sky.
What the heck is with that? The page itself doesn't contain an explanation of "the way we perceive the sky," and the linked essays actually imply that the presence of foreground objects, particularly the horizon, is a key part of this optical illusion.
At best, he's making a meaningless distinction, and being rude about it. This is characteristic of the site in general, and it is not a worthy reference.
Any point on the near side of the moon, except during the lunar eclipse, is perpetually illuminated by either the sun or the Earth. Earthlight is much brighter on the moon than moonlight is on the Earth.
In the lunar night, you could see quite well on the bright side of the moon, but the dark side would only be very dimly starlit (respective nights -- not the same time, obviously). It seems to me that lunar colonists are quite likely to say "bright side" and "dark side" for this reason.
People who have the gall to pose as authorities "correcting popular misconceptions," but only look at the most superficial interpretations, disgust me. I've seen a few sites like that, which start out by interpreting common expressions or sayings in some very narrow, technical sense (which the users of those expressions wouldn't recognize), then tear down the straw man they set up, and enjoy a pained sigh for having to live on a planet with the poor idiots who haven't already recognized their obvious correctness. That they also include some well-known true misconceptions only makes them more harmful by making them seem legitimate.
badastronomy.com? Why not everyonebutmeiswrong.com? I hate snobs.
I mean, if you buy bulletproof glass for your car, and somebody shoots you through it, you might have a case: one of its purposes is to stop bullets. But if you buy an ordinary car, and somebody shoots you through the window, you hardly have grounds to sue them for poor product quality.
Being able to stand up against novel forms of human attack is not basic product quality. Worms, trojans, and viruses are not mere environmental hazards, they are the results of intensive effort to find and exploit any system weaknesses.
Disappointed customers and annoyed partners are punishment enough. Market forces will correct the problem; people will eventually learn not to buy stuff that doesn't work. They will also learn to do their part, since security doesn't come in a shrink-wrapped box.
In a way, these petty vandals are doing us all a favor by forcing us to harden our systems. If nobody exploited the security holes, you couldn't convince people to spend extra money or effort on security. Then, when somebody made a truly serious attack, as an act of war, we would be utterly defenseless. I believe humans evolved an instinct for mischief for just this reason, and so we shouldn't be too hard on the script kiddies.
By not accepting donations, (and by modifying his site so it incidentally supports his move toward being a commercial entity) he may be biting the hand that wants to feed him (but can't afford $20 t-shirts).
It seems fairly common, too, among websites that won't accept donations. They basically say: "I won't accept your $5, because that would be begging. Now, I desperately need money to keep this site up, so please buy this $20 t-shirt so I can get your $5." Oh well. At least it's better than, "Please click on my sponsor's ad even if you don't want their product, so we can get money out of them for nothing."
I do believe that it has to become easier and more efficient, which is why I've worked on a system for more efficient donations. Processing donations is a lot easier than processing verified, mandatory payments, and the issues that kill a micropayment system aren't really a problem for a microdonation system. With an open system like this, you can implement the allocation process in all sorts of interesting ways, such as integration with what you choose to view, or to file for repeat viewing. Convenience is absolutely key, and crufty web services like Amazon Honor System are just not going to cut it for allocating a dozen nickels and pennies per hour.
However, it would be irresponsible to drop copyright before this concept is proven on the market. It can be tested perfectly well without changing copyright law. The competitive advantage of a free (gratis) product is obvious, and if people will pay, free products will displace products with a mandatory cost. If they pay more for free (libre) products, then these will be the best strategy for profit-seeking developers.
Eventually, copyright would just seem pointless. But this can only happen when the users take responsibility for rewarding good products.
Give me your computer and all blank CD-R media you currently own, or I will report you to the authorities for copyright violation.
Whoops, if I wasn't merely making a point, I would have just committed blackmail or extortion (depending on the relevant "authorities"). Pairing a demand with a threat is illegal by default.
...that someone might want to buy a video game for the GBA, load it onto his computer, and play it on his big monitor, with emulator features like saving and restoring multiple states at any time. Or to have a backup and working platform to show his kids 30 years later, long after his GBA is lost or broken.
And that's ignoring, for the moment, that an emulator is the cross-platform developer's #2 special-purpose tool, after his cross-compiler.
If they linked ROMZ sites, that would be boneheaded.
"'None of this says sleep kills people,' said Daniel Buysse, a University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist and the immediate past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. 'You should sleep as much as you need to feel awake, alert and attentive the next day...'"
"Sleeplessness produces health consequences that were not measured in the study,"
"The study relied on people's own reports of their sleeping habits,"
(very few reported that they had "CowboyNeal" hours of sleep)
"'You can choose to eat a Twinkie or a carrot, but I can't choose to sleep 12 hours or six -- I don't have that much voluntary control.'"
I dunno. It seems pretty obvious to me that, all else being equal, people tend to sleep longer when they are unhealthy because they are unhealthy. While I hesitate to use the term... Who am I kidding? I think people who are interpreting this as "Sleep less, live longer" are total Bozos, and I think the popular press is being irresponsible in their desire for a sensational story, as usual.
A Cayley tree is a tree (network with no cycles, a cycle being a set of connections a path you can take in a circle to get back to the same node) in which every node, except those right at the edges, has the same number of connections. As a tree, if you cut any connection, you're seperating the network into two unconnected networks (or isolating one node). Noting that it's a Cayley tree is pointing out that as it grows, nodes at the edges have more and more connections between them (all clients connecting to one server would be a tree, too, but the number of connections to the server would keep on growing, which means it wouldn't be a Cayley tree).
A hypernet is like a grid: imagine the nodes like the places where the lines cross on graph paper, so each node (except at the edges) is connected to 4 others, in a regular, predictable pattern with lots of cycles. Now imagine a 3d grid, like a lot of stacked sheets of graph paper with each node connected not only North, East, South, and West, but also up and down. Each connected to 6 others, in a regular, predictable pattern with lots of cycles. That's as far as you can go with physical models, but in a freely-connecting network like the internet, you can keep going to 8 connections per node (a 4-dimensional hypercube network), 10 connections (5 dimensions), and so on.
That explanation was for a hypercube, a hypertorus would be like going from a bunch of connections around a circle, to a regular set of connections over the surface of a donut, and so forth.
Either way, it's one huge mass of cycles, lots of redundancy, lots of routing choices. If you cut a connection it doesn't matter much; naturally if one user bogs a connection (or chain of connections) down with a heavy load, it's practically like it's been cut. Hypernetworks give you the freedom to route around traffic jams, and the regular structure (cube or torus) simplifies the routing over an unstructured network of random connections.
As you get nearer to the other star, you'll have to turn it around, and let it start decelerating.
You've gotta decelerate if you don't want to just shoot through the other system.
However, there are some tricks you can pull to slow yourself down faster than you get started, and thereby spend more time going faster and get there sooner. For example, you can use a big loop of superconducting wire to transfer your momentum to charged particles. Space isn't all that empty, and you can get drag in an imperfect vacuum if you try hard enough. You might even manage to scoop up propellant to finish braking maneuvers.
Another trick: imagine two mirrored sails forming a right angle. Now imagine that light is coming from both sides equally. Aim the point of the wedge at the destination star, and the light from it will be redirected to the sides, while the light coming from the departure star will be reflected straight back, resulting in a net gain of momentum towards the destination star. With this system, you can get forward acceleration about up until the light from the destination is double the light from the departure point. You can up that by bringing the sails closer to parallel, but you lose area as you do that.
Such a trick might not be worthwhile, of course, since light intensity drops off pretty quickly with distance. You'd get most of your boost early on. As a double-whammy, as your velocity increases, your driving light will red-shift, reducing its pressure, while your braking light will blue-shift, increasing its pressure.
However, as the pressure reduces, you might be able to increase sail area by reprocessing structural support into sail surface.
Maybe some nice people back home will let you leave a system of mirrors (or perhaps solar-pumped lasers?) to focus the sun's light on you as you go, and keep the pressure from dropping off. If you can do that, you can have almost constance acceleration for the trip, which is really nice for space travel. OTOH, how much do you want to trust the people of Earth not to redirect your system for their own transportation or power generation?
They'll produce an IE-less Windows, and an installer for IE. They'll demonstrate it in court. It'll work fine. It will turn out to not be all that hard. Furthermore, the state programmers will point out that it would not have been significantly more difficult or costly to do that way than the integrated way. MS will not be able to rebut this to the satisfaction of the court. MS representatives will be found guilty of perjury. The judge will order them squished with an enormous gavel.
At least, I think that is what they had in mind when they asked for it. I guess we'll see.
Slashdot Mirror
what happens when the Segway reaches it maximum speed?
It doesn't.
It is programatically speed-limited so it always has enough reserve speed to beat your attempt to lean forward.
Ever do judo? There's a move called okuri ashi harai (sending foot sweep), in which you get a person moving in one direction, then sweep his feet out in that same direction. By moving his feet forward, past his center of gravity, you make him fall over backwards even though he's still moving forwards. The fall feels a little bit like sliding into home base.
That's what the Segway does, but with the intent of moving your feet back under your center of gravity.
Remember, unless you're accelerating, you're not going to actually be leaning your center of mass in front of your feet, or you'd be falling over. You just have your body configuration like you'd be leaning forward if you were standing on the ground, but when it accelerated, the Segway rotated the base you're standing on so you became balanced once more.
And in any balance situation, it always keeps enough acceleration potential to kick your feet back under you (and as far in front of you as it needs to slow you down or stop you), no matter how hard you (as a mere human) try to throw yourself in front of your feet.
"Let's not kid ourselves." A.K.A. "If it won't cost too many votes, we can do it." Details of metalaw may shift the balance between opposing factions, but they aren't going to matter if everybody's basically on the same side.
But seriously, that tired theory about how you don't really need a driver's license unless you're using the road for commercial purposes is nonsense. It's a crackpot's delusion that sounds just weird enough to seem true.
By default, riding a mindless motor vehicle "over the public easement" is reckless endangerment of other travellers. It's entirely consistent with the common law to place strict limitations, including the requirement of a license, on this kind of behavior, and generally treat it as a privilege.
As a public hazard by default, you don't need to claim the status of driving a vehicle to be restricted, you just have to do it.
In fact, she's taken a context (copying an A paper to get a good grade) where there is no moral way to copy!
Do you think that was unintentional?
It's actually quite a good match to their general strategy: expressing the importance of obedience to the restrictions of authority in terms of the feelings of the originator.
Does someone else copying your paper without your consent (in and of itself) hurt you? No, but it's against the rules and it might offend you if you heard about it. It's against the rules even if it doesn't offend you, in fact even if you give permission and want it to be done (assuming regular school rules).
Does making a copy of a CD (in and of itself) hurt the artists? No, but it's against the rules and it might offend them if they heard about it. It's against the rules even if it doesn't offend them, in fact even if they give permission and want it to be done (assuming regular recording contracts).
It's not meant to persuade logical people who think about it carefully, it's a soundbite for people who don't want to think about it.
Anyway, this isn't a legal argument, it's an appeal to emotion: "This thing which involves copying information produced by the artist upsets the artist. Would you like it if someone did a thing which involved copy produced by you which upsets you?" There is a consistent theme: that copying information without the producer's consent is wrong.
They (the distributors) know perfectly well that they can't make copying impossible, so they are doing everything possible to make it inconvenient and make people not want to do it.
People know they should pay the artist, that it's the right thing to do. The distributors' strategy then is to make them equate "paying the artist" with "buying the CD." It's their only choice, really; if they even admitted there are other ways of paying the artist that don't require the distributors at all, such as a busking model, they'd be cutting their own throats.
If your argument against them consists of pointing out the logical flaws in their argument, you'll just end up looking like a nitpicker to anyone who doesn't already agree with you completely. If you really want to help promote the move away from obsolete, expensive distribution systems, it would be better to point out other ways to support the artists.
"This looks interesting, I'll just try their free evaluation version..."
"Ugh... they want my email address... Yeah, you send your spam to nobody@notme.com"
"Damn it, these spammy bastards mail you the access codes. [sigh] Okay, here's my real address..."
"A FEW MORE HOURS?!"
"Okay, Kazaa, where's the full version?"
Money now, product later? No doubt these particular guys are honest, but it doesn't give them a whopping big incentive to do their best work as quickly as possible.
Realistically, people are signing up mainly to support them, i.e. donating. Why on Earth should they say, "If you want to donate, this is the amount you must give. We won't take less, and we're not interested in more." ?
I still don't understand why so few open source software projects are taking voluntary payments. It seems like the perfect match: "We give you the software with no obligation, you pay us whatever you like to encourage more work."
Rocket launchers? What's wrong with photon torpedoes and phasers?
OGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!
Are you seriously suggesting that watering the ocean would make the plankton grow?
As far as I know, there are no eletrolytic organisms or other natural process to get the O2 back, so we are screwed.
Photosynthesis takes CO2, H2O, and sunlight to produce carbohydrates.
However, new CO2 goes into the air, spreads out more or less evenly, and its precious carbon becomes available to plants around the world. So carbon balances itself pretty quickly, and you have to really work at releasing it faster than plants can suck it up. New H2O vapor mostly falls in the ocean (or winds up there, eventually), where there's plenty of the stuff already, and doesn't promote new plant growth. So there's not much reason to believe that hydrogen will balance itself out naturally.
You mean "carbohydrates" wasn't just chosen to sound neat? I thought plants got all their component atoms from carbon dioxide and trace minerals in the groundwater, and only used water as a medium!
In all seriousness, though, I think the extra water would pretty much end up in the ocean and not significantly encourage plant growth (unlike increased supplies of available carbon). Neither would the reduction in free oxygen, that I can see. There's no guarantee that the ecosystem will naturally balance a sufficiently huge influx of some active element in a way that doesn't kill some of the more sophisticated and sensitive forms of life (such as mammals).
We'd have to burn an awful lot of the stuff to make a difference, but who knows? Maybe it will be worrisome in a thousand years, and we'll have to start actively breaking down some carbonate rock to balance things out.
..is by cramming the words through your eyes into your brain
Cheap, high-speed internet is great for web surfing, and ideally suited to it. You get your content loaded right away (fast) and then your connection sits idle while you use it (cheap).
It was always designed for that kind of use. However, it wasn't sold that way. As you say, they push high-quality streaming video and similar nonsense that uses 100% of your bandwidth for extended periods. Worse, they just assumed people wouldn't find any use for the free bandwidth during the supposed "idle" periods.
Sure enough, everybody and his dog is finding some way to suck it up with high-bandwidth games or P2P systems. That "it'll just work out somehow" attitude, basing feasibility on unfounded assumptions, was the main mental illness of the e-business boom and bust.
These bandwidth limits should always have been a part of the system. They should even have been part of the advertising, the way they are for the server market. "20 GB/month, burstable at 1MB/second!"
Of course, they shouldn't bill for bandwidth unexpectedly. They should just throttle the connection down to a harmless speed, and then give the user the option to buy more bandwidth.
I said, "The reduced demand will drive prices up higher," but I meant the reduced use would drive up both price tolerance and the need to make more money for value delivered. Basically, the same way arcade game prices crept up from quarters to dollars as fewer people used them less often.
Also, for those of you with sigs turned off (I forget you can do that), my sig links to buskpay.com.
People who support micropayments usually claim that they'll be so small that you won't notice them, much less care about them. Nice dream, but it doesn't take into account the motivations of the people involved.
When people set their mandatory micropayment prices, they'll do it to maximize profit. The prices will find and sit at the awareness threshold of users, so you'll look up and see you've spent $5 over the course of a few minutes without really noticing it. People will respond to this by thinking of internet use as an expensive activity, and keeping it to a minimum. The reduced demand will drive prices up higher.
That's a natural consequence of each entity setting the prices of what their selling. Information doesn't compete on price very well. I forget who said it... "Information wants to be free, because it's so easy to distribute, yet information wants to be expensive, because it's so useful." When the people owning the information set the price, they can make it expensive, because it takes a fairly high price before it's better than not having the information.
However, voluntary micropayments don't have this tendency, being set by the users. Ultimately, I think voluntary payments will win out in any area with a sufficiently clued-in audience to make it work. The competitive advantages of free information are obviously huge, so wherever they can make enough profit to develop a comparable product to the restricted information, they'll win. Also, voluntary micropayments are much simpler and cheaper to implement.
I've written a bit on the kind of systems that would be needed (and can fairly easily be developed) to replace intellectual property restrictions, and I've done some work developing parts of them (see my sig).
It starts off with:
Bad Astronomy: "That's as remote as the dark side of the Moon!"
Good astronomy: "That's as remote as the far side of the Moon!"
...then goes on to complain about popular song lyrics and generally whine about the fact that anyone has ever used the expression "dark side of the moon."
It finishes with: "The Pink Floyd album may be one of the best selling albums of all time, but astronomically it's in eclipse."
It contains no claim about people being mistaught that one side of the moon is always dark, just a baseless assumption that the expression must be interpreted that way. And it fails as an educational resource by missing a good reason to call the far side the "dark side."
It's obnoxious "ha ha!" nitpicking, but worse for being built on bad reasoning. If it was isolated, I wouldn't have bothered, but it's not the only example on the site: take this, for example. This page doesn't even make sense:
Bad Astronomy: The Moon appears larger on the horizon than overhead because you are comparing it to foreground objects.
Good astronomy: The Moon does appear larger on the horizon, but it is because of the way we perceive the sky.
What the heck is with that? The page itself doesn't contain an explanation of "the way we perceive the sky," and the linked essays actually imply that the presence of foreground objects, particularly the horizon, is a key part of this optical illusion.
At best, he's making a meaningless distinction, and being rude about it. This is characteristic of the site in general, and it is not a worthy reference.
Any point on the near side of the moon, except during the lunar eclipse, is perpetually illuminated by either the sun or the Earth. Earthlight is much brighter on the moon than moonlight is on the Earth.
In the lunar night, you could see quite well on the bright side of the moon, but the dark side would only be very dimly starlit (respective nights -- not the same time, obviously). It seems to me that lunar colonists are quite likely to say "bright side" and "dark side" for this reason.
People who have the gall to pose as authorities "correcting popular misconceptions," but only look at the most superficial interpretations, disgust me. I've seen a few sites like that, which start out by interpreting common expressions or sayings in some very narrow, technical sense (which the users of those expressions wouldn't recognize), then tear down the straw man they set up, and enjoy a pained sigh for having to live on a planet with the poor idiots who haven't already recognized their obvious correctness. That they also include some well-known true misconceptions only makes them more harmful by making them seem legitimate.
badastronomy.com? Why not everyonebutmeiswrong.com? I hate snobs.
I mean, if you buy bulletproof glass for your car, and somebody shoots you through it, you might have a case: one of its purposes is to stop bullets. But if you buy an ordinary car, and somebody shoots you through the window, you hardly have grounds to sue them for poor product quality.
Being able to stand up against novel forms of human attack is not basic product quality. Worms, trojans, and viruses are not mere environmental hazards, they are the results of intensive effort to find and exploit any system weaknesses.
Disappointed customers and annoyed partners are punishment enough. Market forces will correct the problem; people will eventually learn not to buy stuff that doesn't work. They will also learn to do their part, since security doesn't come in a shrink-wrapped box.
In a way, these petty vandals are doing us all a favor by forcing us to harden our systems. If nobody exploited the security holes, you couldn't convince people to spend extra money or effort on security. Then, when somebody made a truly serious attack, as an act of war, we would be utterly defenseless. I believe humans evolved an instinct for mischief for just this reason, and so we shouldn't be too hard on the script kiddies.
By not accepting donations, (and by modifying his site so it incidentally supports his move toward being a commercial entity) he may be biting the hand that wants to feed him (but can't afford $20 t-shirts).
It seems fairly common, too, among websites that won't accept donations. They basically say: "I won't accept your $5, because that would be begging. Now, I desperately need money to keep this site up, so please buy this $20 t-shirt so I can get your $5." Oh well. At least it's better than, "Please click on my sponsor's ad even if you don't want their product, so we can get money out of them for nothing."
Why make people jump through hoops?
I don't think so. I believe that purely voluntary, uncoerced payment could not only be adequate, but better for both the users and producers of information products. Traditionally, publishers and retailers took the lion's share of income, so considerably smaller revenue will mean equal or greater profit for the creator. In other words, if you don't make the creators force you to pay them, you can pay them a lot less and they'll be just as well-rewarded and encouraged to make more good stuff.
I do believe that it has to become easier and more efficient, which is why I've worked on a system for more efficient donations. Processing donations is a lot easier than processing verified, mandatory payments, and the issues that kill a micropayment system aren't really a problem for a microdonation system. With an open system like this, you can implement the allocation process in all sorts of interesting ways, such as integration with what you choose to view, or to file for repeat viewing. Convenience is absolutely key, and crufty web services like Amazon Honor System are just not going to cut it for allocating a dozen nickels and pennies per hour.
However, it would be irresponsible to drop copyright before this concept is proven on the market. It can be tested perfectly well without changing copyright law. The competitive advantage of a free (gratis) product is obvious, and if people will pay, free products will displace products with a mandatory cost. If they pay more for free (libre) products, then these will be the best strategy for profit-seeking developers.
Eventually, copyright would just seem pointless. But this can only happen when the users take responsibility for rewarding good products.
Give me your computer and all blank CD-R media you currently own, or I will report you to the authorities for copyright violation.
Whoops, if I wasn't merely making a point, I would have just committed blackmail or extortion (depending on the relevant "authorities"). Pairing a demand with a threat is illegal by default.
...that someone might want to buy a video game for the GBA, load it onto his computer, and play it on his big monitor, with emulator features like saving and restoring multiple states at any time. Or to have a backup and working platform to show his kids 30 years later, long after his GBA is lost or broken.
And that's ignoring, for the moment, that an emulator is the cross-platform developer's #2 special-purpose tool, after his cross-compiler.
If they linked ROMZ sites, that would be boneheaded.
"'None of this says sleep kills people,' said Daniel Buysse, a University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist and the immediate past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. 'You should sleep as much as you need to feel awake, alert and attentive the next day...'"
"Sleeplessness produces health consequences that were not measured in the study,"
"The study relied on people's own reports of their sleeping habits,"
(very few reported that they had "CowboyNeal" hours of sleep)
"'You can choose to eat a Twinkie or a carrot, but I can't choose to sleep 12 hours or six -- I don't have that much voluntary control.'"
I dunno. It seems pretty obvious to me that, all else being equal, people tend to sleep longer when they are unhealthy because they are unhealthy. While I hesitate to use the term... Who am I kidding? I think people who are interpreting this as "Sleep less, live longer" are total Bozos, and I think the popular press is being irresponsible in their desire for a sensational story, as usual.
A Cayley tree is a tree (network with no cycles, a cycle being a set of connections a path you can take in a circle to get back to the same node) in which every node, except those right at the edges, has the same number of connections. As a tree, if you cut any connection, you're seperating the network into two unconnected networks (or isolating one node). Noting that it's a Cayley tree is pointing out that as it grows, nodes at the edges have more and more connections between them (all clients connecting to one server would be a tree, too, but the number of connections to the server would keep on growing, which means it wouldn't be a Cayley tree).
A hypernet is like a grid: imagine the nodes like the places where the lines cross on graph paper, so each node (except at the edges) is connected to 4 others, in a regular, predictable pattern with lots of cycles. Now imagine a 3d grid, like a lot of stacked sheets of graph paper with each node connected not only North, East, South, and West, but also up and down. Each connected to 6 others, in a regular, predictable pattern with lots of cycles. That's as far as you can go with physical models, but in a freely-connecting network like the internet, you can keep going to 8 connections per node (a 4-dimensional hypercube network), 10 connections (5 dimensions), and so on.
That explanation was for a hypercube, a hypertorus would be like going from a bunch of connections around a circle, to a regular set of connections over the surface of a donut, and so forth.
Either way, it's one huge mass of cycles, lots of redundancy, lots of routing choices. If you cut a connection it doesn't matter much; naturally if one user bogs a connection (or chain of connections) down with a heavy load, it's practically like it's been cut. Hypernetworks give you the freedom to route around traffic jams, and the regular structure (cube or torus) simplifies the routing over an unstructured network of random connections.
As you get nearer to the other star, you'll have to turn it around, and let it start decelerating.
You've gotta decelerate if you don't want to just shoot through the other system.
However, there are some tricks you can pull to slow yourself down faster than you get started, and thereby spend more time going faster and get there sooner. For example, you can use a big loop of superconducting wire to transfer your momentum to charged particles. Space isn't all that empty, and you can get drag in an imperfect vacuum if you try hard enough. You might even manage to scoop up propellant to finish braking maneuvers.
Another trick: imagine two mirrored sails forming a right angle. Now imagine that light is coming from both sides equally. Aim the point of the wedge at the destination star, and the light from it will be redirected to the sides, while the light coming from the departure star will be reflected straight back, resulting in a net gain of momentum towards the destination star. With this system, you can get forward acceleration about up until the light from the destination is double the light from the departure point. You can up that by bringing the sails closer to parallel, but you lose area as you do that.
Such a trick might not be worthwhile, of course, since light intensity drops off pretty quickly with distance. You'd get most of your boost early on. As a double-whammy, as your velocity increases, your driving light will red-shift, reducing its pressure, while your braking light will blue-shift, increasing its pressure.
However, as the pressure reduces, you might be able to increase sail area by reprocessing structural support into sail surface.
Maybe some nice people back home will let you leave a system of mirrors (or perhaps solar-pumped lasers?) to focus the sun's light on you as you go, and keep the pressure from dropping off. If you can do that, you can have almost constance acceleration for the trip, which is really nice for space travel. OTOH, how much do you want to trust the people of Earth not to redirect your system for their own transportation or power generation?
It's a thoroughly interesting topic.
They'll produce an IE-less Windows, and an installer for IE. They'll demonstrate it in court. It'll work fine. It will turn out to not be all that hard. Furthermore, the state programmers will point out that it would not have been significantly more difficult or costly to do that way than the integrated way. MS will not be able to rebut this to the satisfaction of the court. MS representatives will be found guilty of perjury. The judge will order them squished with an enormous gavel.
At least, I think that is what they had in mind when they asked for it. I guess we'll see.