It depends on how they're stored. Stick them in a no-humidity constant-temperature environment like an abandoned salt mine, and they should be fine for a couple of centuries.
Unless I want to build custom hardware, I don't believe it can be done...
There are service bureaus that will read those disks and stick the data on a secured server to download. Hell, you can even get paper tape and hollerith cards read for you.
that's why there was a legal question at some point about the sale of used CDs. it never went anywhere, but the big record companies would have loved to destroy the used CD market.
Not all monopolies are bad. Alcoa had a monopoly on aluminum production in the USA for something like fifty years, and in that time, the price of aluminum fell drastically.
Some time ago there was a discussion on Bill Gates' charitable donations and whether he was a "good person."
Carnegie built a bunch of libraries, but he also hired Pinkertons to murder striking steelworkers.
I'd say Gates isn't as bad as Carnegie (as far as I know, he's never had anybody killed), but he certainly didn't come by his wealth honestly. I'm not even talking about the anti-trust violations, I'm talking about the multiple instances of MS flat-out stealing code. They did it to DR, they did it to Stacker, and I'm sure there are many more that I've never even heard about.
I said they had licence.. it means they have permission.
The library doesn't have license, it has liberty: there's no permission involved. An owner of a book is entitled to lend it out (or even rent it out), whether or not the author approves.
I agree with the sentiment, but just want to point out that "copyright" doesn't mean the "right to make copies".
Yes, it does. The copyright is the exclusive legal right to copy, print, publish, perform, etc. the work in question, held by the author or the author's assignees.
No, the libraries have printed copies of the books, which they own. There's no "license" held by the library, and the library doesn't gain the copyright because they own a copy of the book.
I'm pretty sure the folks at Apple have enough sense to know that, and I know they have the institutional courage to keep making a product people actually want, while the critics continue to decry the lack of "improvements" that would knock the product right out of the market.
You are correct in that assumption. A big part of any product development project at Apple is deciding what the product shouldn't do.
Creative can stick FM recievers into the Zen, and get one more checkbox on the brochure. Apple would rather have the sales;-)
Online distribution changes that; distribution costs are rock-bottom
um... The incremental cost of distributing a particular song are pretty low. The distribution costs overall are immense.
I agree with you though, that the RIAA are scared to death of the day that Apple deals with musicians directly. That could be why they seem so eager to screw the pooch but good before they lose the ability to derail the iTMS.
Jobs works for $1/year at Apple and gets some bonuses from Apple board of directors sometimes.
Well, he's made quite a bit for his trouble. Of course, with the market capitalization of AAPL over $40 Billion these days, I'd have to say as a shareholder that if Apple paid him a billion a year, I'm cool with that.
Steve Jobs is the new middle man but, unlike the record companies, he doesn't manufacture music which costs money to make into CDs and Records, he doesn't have to deal with shipping costs which cost money to move CDs and Records, etc.
The iTMS infrastructure isn't cheap. I've seen that server room.
So basically, he's locking everyone out and setting Apple up to be the biggest middle man in the history of middle men, with no actual manufacturing costs needed for content distribution. Cha-ching!
It's not manufacturing cost, but it sure is distribution cost.
It's simpler than that. All you need is an IR-reflective sheet in front of the camera, at an oblique angle so that it wouldn't return the IR to the source.
They are right. After all, they managed to integrate a calendar and address book into an email application. It's no longer just email, it's email and calendaring! See the difference? (No, I don't either.)
Ah, but you missed the most important part: They charge per-seat, and it's unreliable and unsecureable!
Any mass produced flying car system will need to operate along routes, just like air transport traffic does now.
No, it will have to have a peer-to-peer collision avoidance negotiation system.
Sadly, there are still mid air collisions between airliners, even though they have perfectly good TCAS!
Let's see... The last figures I saw showed a rate of about one flight in a million resulting in a mid-air collision, and even those almost always happen where traffic is concentrated (in and out of airports). Fatal collisions between planes on the ground are far more common, and that's a hazard of making all the aircraft operate out of a small number of airfields. With individual, point-to-point travel, you don't get that concentration of traffic.
Can you imagine what it would be like to have 30, 40, 50 THOUSAND aircraft (flying CARS, think how many cars we have on the road) in a localised airspace
I can imagine it being far better than funnelling all those vehicles into narrow lanes on the ground, as we do now.
- no way we can manage that yet, they'd be smacking into each other all over the place.
Nope, they'd be smacking into each other with far less frequency than happens today with cars on the road. Just going into three dimensions vastly increases the space available, and going point-to-point would drop an average hour-long commute to a couple of minutes.
I think that what's scaring you is the idea of trying to scale TCAS, and that should scare you. TCAS is not scalable to tens of thousands of aircraft. What we'd move to instead would be peer negotiation among the aircraft that were within half a minute or so of flight time from each other.
Remember, thousands of kilometres/miles is a long, long way to point one of these things
Yes, it needs to be well-collimated, and the power captured will fall by the inverse-square law. That alone doesn't make power transmission impossible, it just means that the collimation has to be very good, and the receiver may need to deploy a larger collection antenna array as it climbs.
Also, the higher it gets, the less power is needed to climb, since the orbital velocity will be increasing with altitude. The elevator will approach weightlessness as it reaches the geosynchronous orbit.
I suggest you look it up and you will understand why I do not take the suggestion seriously.
I suggest you drop the supercilious tone if you want anyone to take you seriously.
Tesla showed that broadcast power was very lossy a very long time ago, so I ignored the Star Trek beamed talk because I wanted to take you seriously.
Tesla didn't know anything about coherent light sources, and his experiments with trying to send power omnidirectionally by RF isn't pertinent to the discussion.
. Even if the power was transmitted by a yet to be invented microwave laser the beam would spread out a great deal,
Yet to be invented? The Maser was invented in 1953, and Masers can be collimated just about as well as Lasers can.
BTW, your put-down of the parent post certainly doesn't incline me towards taking you seriously. Perhaps you should put a little effort into knowing what you're talking about before you presume to dismiss anyone else's ideas as "bad SF misunderstanding".
Slashdot Mirror
Google for it. It's been a pretty long time since I looked into those services.
-jcr
What's the lifespan of punch cards?
It depends on how they're stored. Stick them in a no-humidity constant-temperature environment like an abandoned salt mine, and they should be fine for a couple of centuries.
-jcr
Unless I want to build custom hardware, I don't believe it can be done...
There are service bureaus that will read those disks and stick the data on a secured server to download. Hell, you can even get paper tape and hollerith cards read for you.
-jcr
that's why there was a legal question at some point about the sale of used CDs. it never went anywhere, but the big record companies would have loved to destroy the used CD market.
It was defeated under the First Sale doctrine.
-jcr
Such as?
Digital Research and Stacker, to name two.
-jcr
Microsoft do not steal anything. ...except other people's code.
-jcr
Not all monopolies are bad. Alcoa had a monopoly on aluminum production in the USA for something like fifty years, and in that time, the price of aluminum fell drastically.
-jcr
Some time ago there was a discussion on Bill Gates' charitable donations and whether he was a "good person."
Carnegie built a bunch of libraries, but he also hired Pinkertons to murder striking steelworkers.
I'd say Gates isn't as bad as Carnegie (as far as I know, he's never had anybody killed), but he certainly didn't come by his wealth honestly. I'm not even talking about the anti-trust violations, I'm talking about the multiple instances of MS flat-out stealing code. They did it to DR, they did it to Stacker, and I'm sure there are many more that I've never even heard about.
-jcr
Windows is great for the normal person who uses computers for everyday things
No, it's not.
It's poorly designed, bloated, fragile, and unsecurable. It's a nightmare for the "normal" person, and sets their expectations at rock-bottom.
-jcr
I said they had licence.. it means they have permission.
The library doesn't have license, it has liberty: there's no permission involved. An owner of a book is entitled to lend it out (or even rent it out), whether or not the author approves.
-jcr
I agree with the sentiment, but just want to point out that "copyright" doesn't mean the "right to make copies".
Yes, it does. The copyright is the exclusive legal right to copy, print, publish, perform, etc. the work in question, held by the author or the author's assignees.
-jcr
The libraries have licence
No, the libraries have printed copies of the books, which they own. There's no "license" held by the library, and the library doesn't gain the copyright because they own a copy of the book.
-jcr
I'm pretty sure the folks at Apple have enough sense to know that, and I know they have the institutional courage to keep making a product people actually want, while the critics continue to decry the lack of "improvements" that would knock the product right out of the market.
;-)
You are correct in that assumption. A big part of any product development project at Apple is deciding what the product shouldn't do.
Creative can stick FM recievers into the Zen, and get one more checkbox on the brochure. Apple would rather have the sales
-jcr
I'm holding out for the iPod Femto.
;-)
Apple developed it, and had it all ready to go to manufacturing, but somebody sneezed and they're back to sqare one.
Personally, I would think that having to use a scanning-tunnelling microscope to operate it would be a drawback.
-jcr
Online distribution changes that; distribution costs are rock-bottom
um... The incremental cost of distributing a particular song are pretty low. The distribution costs overall are immense.
I agree with you though, that the RIAA are scared to death of the day that Apple deals with musicians directly. That could be why they seem so eager to screw the pooch but good before they lose the ability to derail the iTMS.
-jcr
Jobs works for $1/year at Apple and gets some bonuses from Apple board of directors sometimes.
Well, he's made quite a bit for his trouble. Of course, with the market capitalization of AAPL over $40 Billion these days, I'd have to say as a shareholder that if Apple paid him a billion a year, I'm cool with that.
-jcr
Steve Jobs is the new middle man but, unlike the record companies, he doesn't manufacture music which costs money to make into CDs and Records, he doesn't have to deal with shipping costs which cost money to move CDs and Records, etc.
The iTMS infrastructure isn't cheap. I've seen that server room.
So basically, he's locking everyone out and setting Apple up to be the biggest middle man in the history of middle men, with no actual manufacturing costs needed for content distribution. Cha-ching!
It's not manufacturing cost, but it sure is distribution cost.
-jcr
It's simpler than that. All you need is an IR-reflective sheet in front of the camera, at an oblique angle so that it wouldn't return the IR to the source.
-jcr
Maybe They Took "Redmond start your photocopiers"
just a little too seriously.
Heh. When I saw that poster at WWDC '04, what went through my mind was: "They did start them. In 1982!"
-jcr
They are right. After all, they managed to integrate a calendar and address book into an email application. It's no longer just email, it's email and calendaring! See the difference? (No, I don't either.)
Ah, but you missed the most important part: They charge per-seat, and it's unreliable and unsecureable!
-jcr
Quartz Composer isn't really a design tool. It's a bit tricky to describe, you'll just have to use it.
BTW, Apple's been using the "Quartz" name for their graphics library since 10.1 shipped.
-jcr
That's where you're wrong.
Nope.
Any mass produced flying car system will need to operate along routes, just like air transport traffic does now.
No, it will have to have a peer-to-peer collision avoidance negotiation system.
Sadly, there are still mid air collisions between airliners, even though they have perfectly good TCAS!
Let's see... The last figures I saw showed a rate of about one flight in a million resulting in a mid-air collision, and even those almost always happen where traffic is concentrated (in and out of airports). Fatal collisions between planes on the ground are far more common, and that's a hazard of making all the aircraft operate out of a small number of airfields. With individual, point-to-point travel, you don't get that concentration of traffic.
Can you imagine what it would be like to have 30, 40, 50 THOUSAND aircraft (flying CARS, think how many cars we have on the road) in a localised airspace
I can imagine it being far better than funnelling all those vehicles into narrow lanes on the ground, as we do now.
- no way we can manage that yet, they'd be smacking into each other all over the place.
Nope, they'd be smacking into each other with far less frequency than happens today with cars on the road. Just going into three dimensions vastly increases the space available, and going point-to-point would drop an average hour-long commute to a couple of minutes.
I think that what's scaring you is the idea of trying to scale TCAS, and that should scare you. TCAS is not scalable to tens of thousands of aircraft. What we'd move to instead would be peer negotiation among the aircraft that were within half a minute or so of flight time from each other.
-jcr
Remember, thousands of kilometres/miles is a long, long way to point one of these things
Yes, it needs to be well-collimated, and the power captured will fall by the inverse-square law. That alone doesn't make power transmission impossible, it just means that the collimation has to be very good, and the receiver may need to deploy a larger collection antenna array as it climbs.
Also, the higher it gets, the less power is needed to climb, since the orbital velocity will be increasing with altitude. The elevator will approach weightlessness as it reaches the geosynchronous orbit.
I suggest you look it up and you will understand why I do not take the suggestion seriously.
I suggest you drop the supercilious tone if you want anyone to take you seriously.
-jcr
Tesla showed that broadcast power was very lossy a very long time ago, so I ignored the Star Trek beamed talk because I wanted to take you seriously.
Tesla didn't know anything about coherent light sources, and his experiments with trying to send power omnidirectionally by RF isn't pertinent to the discussion.
. Even if the power was transmitted by a yet to be invented microwave laser the beam would spread out a great deal,
Yet to be invented? The Maser was invented in 1953, and Masers can be collimated just about as well as Lasers can.
BTW, your put-down of the parent post certainly doesn't incline me towards taking you seriously. Perhaps you should put a little effort into knowing what you're talking about before you presume to dismiss anyone else's ideas as "bad SF misunderstanding".
-jcr
Current regulations (faa i think) prevent mile high cities.
The FAA outlawed Denver?
-jcr