> On Gnutella for example, freeloaders are more
> and more becoming the bane of Gnutella. They are
> getting their music, but not contributing
> anything back, bogging down the network, and
> making the entire thing less enjoyable for
> everyone.
Because I believe in the inherent goodness of human nature over incalculable ignorance, I will take this as the ultimate troll around here.
For the dimwitted who don't get it, the Gnutella system with respect to music, is, like Napster before it, based on the very users being freeloaders on the music industry.
> there exists a universe where Star Trek IS the
> reality.:-) Something to ponder!
I suppose statistically it is possible if unlikely for one generation to produce another that is 99% highly attractive by their sexual standards. Most Star Trekish realities would have female captains of Voyager that were a bit more Janet Renoish.
> In any event, considering a history that is
> identical to our own except that one set of
> supposedly self-aware macromolecules
> discovered a bit of physics before another set
> of supposedly self-aware macromolecules is
> rather uninteresting, compared to, oh, say,
> a history in which the ambient energy was too
> high to allow the formation of mass.
Yes, a universe where nothing happened is mildly interesting for the 30 seconds needed to study its random universal constants, where a universe of an alternate history would be boring indeed.
This comment reminds me of Heinlein's Time Enuf for Love, where, bored of existance, 2000 year old Lazurus Long asks the superintelligent computers to find him something new and exciting to do lest he have no reason to live anymore. Much time goes by. In passing conversation with one such machine, Lazurus learns they had a theory of how to go back in time, but had never tried it.
"Why not?!?!?" asked Lazurus.
"Because you said you wanted to do something new." said the computer.
The important thing was to get Japan to capitulate before the Soviet Union got involved so we wouldn't have to carve that up after the war the way we did Germany.
> As an aside, I think the main reason Communism
> doesn't work is that ignores human nature.
Another way to look at it is that, in communism, everyone gets a cut of the profit before those who do the hard work. You get fed and housed the same whether you work hard or not, working hard buys you nothing, no one works hard.
> The sun is massive enough that the gravity well
> in the center is massive enough so that the
> nuclei of hydrogen particles collapse into
> helium
The gravity of the sun isn't great enough to directly override the nuclear forces and cause fusion to occur. The weight of all the sun's material pressing inward because of that gravity, however, is great enough to cause fusion.
To marketing, "random data" means a.jpeg, a.mpeg, an audio file, a.exe file, a text file, a.doc, etc. I.e. the algorithms apply to general data, as opposed to schemes to compress specific data (aka.jpeg for pictures,.mpeg for a series of similar pictures, etc.)
There was a question whether Quake III and its theoretical max of 64 or 80 (or 128?) peeps on one level counted as "massively". It certainly pushed the same limits of number of people in a "zone" or "area" that MMORPG's did.
Of course, it was only marginally less persistent than EQ...
> Given our presence at the top of every food
> chain on the planet, we're in a rather
> vulnerable position because we could easily wipe
> out our food sources.
I submit we are the most stable organism to live on this planet, at least of anything larger than a bug. There is no reason humanity shouldn't last a few hundred years longer to get here, which is all that's needed. Even the worst and most irrational irresponsible threats of global warming (deserts and massive flooding) won't reduce humanity to some tiny, caveman-like group of survivors or less.
Exactly. A future world where face recognition systems, pheromone sniffers, insta-DNA devices analyzing your cast off skin cells, voice recognition systems looking for your voice, or analyzing your words...
...beep beep beep, whirrr, click! You have violated municipal regulation 4667 against profanity in public. Please pay this $200.00 fine.
...you were observed lying in a brothel bed with spurs on your boots, violating Nevada statute 37 of the year 1886. Please pay this $200.00 fine.
...your dog p000ped in the street and you did not scoop up the p000p within 3 minutes...
...you haven't paid this traffic ticket...
So many laws, and with robotic, machine efficiency to detect and catch the perps.
So, to paraphrase a famous statement, "By God, I wish these laws could be enforced by steam!" Who is more likely to have said that? A founding father, or Hitler and Stalin?
> Ah, I see. Frankly, I don't think Northern
> Ireland is a particularly good model for the
> kind of society I want to live in.
Tell me about it. < sarcasm=on>Just when the British have you convinced they have a case about the evil Catholics there,</sarcasm> the English equivalent of trailer trash have a parade through Catholic neighborhoods about an ancient brutal war victory of Protestants over Catholics.
> to prohibit the loss of distribution rights to
> things like the Olympics.
As someone who lives near the Canadian border, all I can say is you have no idea how crappy US Olympics coverage is.
In the US, they pay so much for the Olymipcs, they have to maximize their returns. To do this, they find out that people will watch stuff about the Olympics more than the actual relatively boring sports.
So, one network gets to lock up the rights to the Olympics, and finds out it earns more money showing "up close and personal"'s, tours of the Olympic town, various bad toupees, whatever, anything, anything but the actual sports, which will lose advertising dollars.
Thusly "The People" are deprived of watching the actual sports.
Of course, in the last couple of Olympics, Canadian television had been doing more of this, too, so even they are drying up. Must have introduced bidding for the Olympics up there...
You will notice MTV is in a similar situation with music. They lock up exclusivity contracts with music publishers -- sell only to us or we won't show your other stuff. Then, it turns out just about anything gets higher ratings than actual music videos. VH1, too. "Where music is first! We now return you to 'The Real World'!" (Of course, the reverse is true, too. Music companies say, "Show this latest turd by Madonna or Michael Jackson and put it in the heavy rotation list for two weeks or we'll pull the videos of the three next one hit wonders. Oh, and have them as 'stars' singing on the next Fashion Awards.")
> One should not forget that national laws apply
> even when you're in front of your computer
Realize:
1. Many laws are stupid and should never have been passed. They are "feel good" laws that, if actually enforced hard, would mess things up and restrict freedom. These laws come from both ends of the (standard) political spectrum.
2. Many laws are not intended to be enforced evenly, but rather as a tool for officials to hassle people. Witness the idiocy of police in the US using traffic laws to pull over a car for any old reason, even if the reason is CYA after the fact.
3. As various people have pointed out, it is in the government's interest to have tons of laws such that people can't do anything without doing something illegal. This allows governments to yank in undesireables at the government's whim since some law somewhere must be broken in the normal, moral course of daily life.
In a world of the not so distant future, where cameras monitor every street corner and feed faces, voices, and activities into computers, you could very well end up with something tyrranical like Demolition Man, where omnipresent kiosk machines insta-issue tickets to you when you speak angrily, or swear, or do just about anything.
It's time for a constitutional ammendment where all laws at state and federal level not passed with 90% supermajority auto-expire in 5 years, with no grandfathering clause.
How has the natural lifespan changed for normal people, once you subtract childhood deaths, accidents, murders, lack of nutrition, etc. leaving only normal biological problems.
Although everything is of interest to "public health", how long could one expect to live once you strip out these "outliers" as a neural netticist might call them?
Yes, but religion is a harmless, quaint anachronism these days. Medical scares via "I have the solution!" and hand waving still not only exist and thrive, are used as political devices at the highest level -- "Let us dictat(or) how you people interact by setting fees for all services and outlawing private agreements between doctors and patients." Remember Newspeak? Control is Freedom, Freedom is Bondage?
Smoke and handwaving, in a sense worse than a snake oil salesman since a snake oil salesman can't put you in jail if you don't want to buy their product.
Remember also that all evolution cares about is whether you successfully reproduce, so you really only have to live long enough to do so, with a minor pressure on living long enough that your child lives to adulthood (via your help.)
If you're male, 40's is enuf, then heart disease can have you...
Cue technologies did a similar thing with the RDS portion of the FM radio spectrum.
RDS allows stations to broadcast things like song title, station call letters, and a coded number telling the type of music/program being played (e.g. Rock, Soft-Rock, Jazz, etc.)
Most stations don't broadcast RDS (in the US, anyway) so Cue went around and paid stations to use that wee bit of binary bandwidth to use as 1-way paging. Don't know the status recently, though, because the last time I looked into it it was two years ago.
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It's like complaining there are freeloaders hanging around at the local fencing operation for shoplifters.
> On Gnutella for example, freeloaders are more
> and more becoming the bane of Gnutella. They are
> getting their music, but not contributing
> anything back, bogging down the network, and
> making the entire thing less enjoyable for
> everyone.
Because I believe in the inherent goodness of human nature over incalculable ignorance, I will take this as the ultimate troll around here.
For the dimwitted who don't get it, the Gnutella system with respect to music, is, like Napster before it, based on the very users being freeloaders on the music industry.
> On the other hand if a mechanism exists to
> punish free loaders then more people will be
> motivated to contribute?
Reality punishes people who don't work hard. They can only become freeloaders in societies that thieve from hard workers to give to freeloaders.
> there exists a universe where Star Trek IS the :-) Something to ponder!
> reality.
I suppose statistically it is possible if unlikely for one generation to produce another that is 99% highly attractive by their sexual standards. Most Star Trekish realities would have female captains of Voyager that were a bit more Janet Renoish.
> In any event, considering a history that is
> identical to our own except that one set of
> supposedly self-aware macromolecules
> discovered a bit of physics before another set
> of supposedly self-aware macromolecules is
> rather uninteresting, compared to, oh, say,
> a history in which the ambient energy was too
> high to allow the formation of mass.
Yes, a universe where nothing happened is mildly interesting for the 30 seconds needed to study its random universal constants, where a universe of an alternate history would be boring indeed.
This comment reminds me of Heinlein's Time Enuf for Love, where, bored of existance, 2000 year old Lazurus Long asks the superintelligent computers to find him something new and exciting to do lest he have no reason to live anymore. Much time goes by. In passing conversation with one such machine, Lazurus learns they had a theory of how to go back in time, but had never tried it.
"Why not?!?!?" asked Lazurus.
"Because you said you wanted to do something new." said the computer.
The important thing was to get Japan to capitulate before the Soviet Union got involved so we wouldn't have to carve that up after the war the way we did Germany.
> As an aside, I think the main reason Communism
> doesn't work is that ignores human nature.
Another way to look at it is that, in communism, everyone gets a cut of the profit before those who do the hard work. You get fed and housed the same whether you work hard or not, working hard buys you nothing, no one works hard.
> The sun is massive enough that the gravity well
> in the center is massive enough so that the
> nuclei of hydrogen particles collapse into
> helium
The gravity of the sun isn't great enough to directly override the nuclear forces and cause fusion to occur. The weight of all the sun's material pressing inward because of that gravity, however, is great enough to cause fusion.
Starbuck is still stuck on that planet with the Sri Lanken, isn't he?
Of course, even though it can't be true, if it turned out to be true...
...and they patented their genius and hard work...
...clods around here would claim how idiotic their obvious work is and how it shouldn't be patented.
To marketing, "random data" means a .jpeg, a .mpeg, an audio file, a .exe file, a text file, a .doc, etc. I.e. the algorithms apply to general data, as opposed to schemes to compress specific data (aka .jpeg for pictures, .mpeg for a series of similar pictures, etc.)
There was a question whether Quake III and its theoretical max of 64 or 80 (or 128?) peeps on one level counted as "massively". It certainly pushed the same limits of number of people in a "zone" or "area" that MMORPG's did.
Of course, it was only marginally less persistent than EQ...
> Given our presence at the top of every food
> chain on the planet, we're in a rather
> vulnerable position because we could easily wipe
> out our food sources.
I submit we are the most stable organism to live on this planet, at least of anything larger than a bug. There is no reason humanity shouldn't last a few hundred years longer to get here, which is all that's needed. Even the worst and most irrational irresponsible threats of global warming (deserts and massive flooding) won't reduce humanity to some tiny, caveman-like group of survivors or less.
Exactly. A future world where face recognition systems, pheromone sniffers, insta-DNA devices analyzing your cast off skin cells, voice recognition systems looking for your voice, or analyzing your words...
...beep beep beep, whirrr, click! You have violated municipal regulation 4667 against profanity in public. Please pay this $200.00 fine.
...you were observed lying in a brothel bed with spurs on your boots, violating Nevada statute 37 of the year 1886. Please pay this $200.00 fine.
...your dog p000ped in the street and you did not scoop up the p000p within 3 minutes...
...you haven't paid this traffic ticket...
So many laws, and with robotic, machine efficiency to detect and catch the perps.
So, to paraphrase a famous statement, "By God, I wish these laws could be enforced by steam!" Who is more likely to have said that? A founding father, or Hitler and Stalin?
> Ah, I see. Frankly, I don't think Northern
> Ireland is a particularly good model for the
> kind of society I want to live in.
Tell me about it. < sarcasm=on>Just when the British have you convinced they have a case about the evil Catholics there,</sarcasm> the English equivalent of trailer trash have a parade through Catholic neighborhoods about an ancient brutal war victory of Protestants over Catholics.
> to prohibit the loss of distribution rights to
> things like the Olympics.
As someone who lives near the Canadian border, all I can say is you have no idea how crappy US Olympics coverage is.
In the US, they pay so much for the Olymipcs, they have to maximize their returns. To do this, they find out that people will watch stuff about the Olympics more than the actual relatively boring sports.
So, one network gets to lock up the rights to the Olympics, and finds out it earns more money showing "up close and personal"'s, tours of the Olympic town, various bad toupees, whatever, anything, anything but the actual sports, which will lose advertising dollars.
Thusly "The People" are deprived of watching the actual sports.
Of course, in the last couple of Olympics, Canadian television had been doing more of this, too, so even they are drying up. Must have introduced bidding for the Olympics up there...
You will notice MTV is in a similar situation with music. They lock up exclusivity contracts with music publishers -- sell only to us or we won't show your other stuff. Then, it turns out just about anything gets higher ratings than actual music videos. VH1, too. "Where music is first! We now return you to 'The Real World'!" (Of course, the reverse is true, too. Music companies say, "Show this latest turd by Madonna or Michael Jackson and put it in the heavy rotation list for two weeks or we'll pull the videos of the three next one hit wonders. Oh, and have them as 'stars' singing on the next Fashion Awards.")
> Is there a contest going on who can create the
> most genetically faulty child? For this theory
> carries much evidence.
Technically, yes. The winners usually die. It's called "evolution."
> One should not forget that national laws apply
> even when you're in front of your computer
Realize:
1. Many laws are stupid and should never have been passed. They are "feel good" laws that, if actually enforced hard, would mess things up and restrict freedom. These laws come from both ends of the (standard) political spectrum.
2. Many laws are not intended to be enforced evenly, but rather as a tool for officials to hassle people. Witness the idiocy of police in the US using traffic laws to pull over a car for any old reason, even if the reason is CYA after the fact.
3. As various people have pointed out, it is in the government's interest to have tons of laws such that people can't do anything without doing something illegal. This allows governments to yank in undesireables at the government's whim since some law somewhere must be broken in the normal, moral course of daily life.
In a world of the not so distant future, where cameras monitor every street corner and feed faces, voices, and activities into computers, you could very well end up with something tyrranical like Demolition Man, where omnipresent kiosk machines insta-issue tickets to you when you speak angrily, or swear, or do just about anything.
It's time for a constitutional ammendment where all laws at state and federal level not passed with 90% supermajority auto-expire in 5 years, with no grandfathering clause.
That's something I've always wondered about.
How has the natural lifespan changed for normal people, once you subtract childhood deaths, accidents, murders, lack of nutrition, etc. leaving only normal biological problems.
Although everything is of interest to "public health", how long could one expect to live once you strip out these "outliers" as a neural netticist might call them?
> maybe Jesus really was an X-Man
He'd have to be. His healing and resurrection and feeding powers wouldn't be good enough to get him past the robot receptionist of the Fantastic Four.
> Is Alex Chiu's miracle Eternal Life Device
> [alexchiu.com] going to give me cancer now?
Maybe not, it's still worth a try. You could still live to be a nonsentient, drooling 140 year-old...
Yes, but religion is a harmless, quaint anachronism these days. Medical scares via "I have the solution!" and hand waving still not only exist and thrive, are used as political devices at the highest level -- "Let us dictat(or) how you people interact by setting fees for all services and outlawing private agreements between doctors and patients." Remember Newspeak? Control is Freedom, Freedom is Bondage?
Smoke and handwaving, in a sense worse than a snake oil salesman since a snake oil salesman can't put you in jail if you don't want to buy their product.
Remember also that all evolution cares about is whether you successfully reproduce, so you really only have to live long enough to do so, with a minor pressure on living long enough that your child lives to adulthood (via your help.)
If you're male, 40's is enuf, then heart disease can have you...
There should be no comma between "formed" and "English".
Cue technologies did a similar thing with the RDS portion of the FM radio spectrum.
RDS allows stations to broadcast things like song title, station call letters, and a coded number telling the type of music/program being played (e.g. Rock, Soft-Rock, Jazz, etc.)
Most stations don't broadcast RDS (in the US, anyway) so Cue went around and paid stations to use that wee bit of binary bandwidth to use as 1-way paging. Don't know the status recently, though, because the last time I looked into it it was two years ago.