Must be the same moderator. Get a fucking clue, you loser. There's a reason this topic is deserted. It's a combination of a really stupid news item and an even-more-stupid moderator. Perhaps you would consider just *educating yourself past second grade* before rating information you can't possibly understand?
Wow you must be the guy who offered up this gem, huh?
I'd like to hear the genius moderators explain the size savings when the include the these items in the "storage device":
1. Vaccum pump to maintain data integrity. 2. Liquid nitrogen cooling system to maintain data integrity 3. Scanning EM to read the data. 4. EM force probe to write the data.
Let's see, that should all fit in... a two car garage.
Let's compare to an abacus: 1. human being and way to get them food 2. abacus
That should easily fit in a one-car garage, and it works 1000s of times faster.
Relative cost? Maybe 10 USD for the abacus startup, and 10 USD per hour for the operator. Throw in food (we are GOOD employers) and you go up to maybe 13 USD per hour.
Okay, maybe 300, 000 USD for each of the EM, 80, 000 USD for the cooling system, 20,000 USD for the vaccuum system. So that's about 700,000 startup. Then you have the electriciy costs for the EMs, not trivial.
At this rate, the genius atomic memory becomes cost effective (it never becomes time-effective or space-effective) in about 50,000 years.
So yeah, I am an idiot, someone give me 700,000 an free electricity so I can take advantage of this bits/hour tech!!!!
Exactly. Verry slow at present but being able to keep the atoms where they were put is a step towards a viable atomic storage.
I was trying to think of some reason this was news. That was the only reason I could think of. It's really not much of a reason.
And to reiterate, the problem is NOT the temperature! The problem is that NO ONE KNOWS how to move those atoms OR read those atoms AT any meaningful speed. If you want super-small data storage whose transfer rates are measured in bits/hour, you've found your system!
Until someone *thinks of an idea" (because no such idea has been supposed with any more reality than a photon torpedo) for how to do this, it's just guys futzing with their EM. And that is hardly worthy as news.
As for the TROLL rating, fuck Slashdot's stupid fucking articles and their stupid fucking moderators. You will see my point when they post my first raudulent press release as an item.
The responses are perfectly matched to the quality of the original item.
Okay there is one more difference. I can move eggs in the cartons at the rate of maybe 20/min, and the cost is the price of the eggs.
You can have your "memory device" and several million dollars of lab equipment, and you can perform the same operation at maybe 5/hour.
So I am moving the data 360 times faster for 0.000000000001 times the cost.
Also, we have this thing called transistor memory, it has actually been around for a while, and it makes both these crackheaded schemes foolish. Maybe you've heard of it?
My point is: There is way to move the atoms, OR detect their positions, in any manner that could be considered useful or reasonable. Further, there is NO PLAN OR IDEA for how this could be accomplished. No one is "working on" a system to do this, because no one has *an idea of how to do this*.
I am not saying it will never happen, but I am saying it will not happen in your children's lifetimes.
And the additional added feature of "working" in some meaningful sense. It will take maybe 100 years and a few phenomenal tech breakthroughs before this "idea" is even remotely practical.
It's just some guys futzing with their electron microscope!!!! They are moving the "bits" ONE BY ONE BY HAND! Am I supposed to consider this a "memory device"? A pencil and paper is 10,000 times faster.
Well if you read the article, they evaporated gold on silicon and then more silicon on that. That is the substrate ("what is under them").
The reason it looks so flat is because you get a picture of an electron cloud from an electron microscope. You can't see the nucleus, it's a tiny point inside that fuzzy mess of electrons. So when you pack a bunch of conducting or semi-conducting atoms together, their electron clouds all join up, electrons go promiscuously from atom to atom, and the net appearance is one giant, flat electron cloud.
If you could somehow do a 3-D picture of a tiny ball of gold, it would just look like a sphere, because the electrons are all shared, and they would spread out evenly over the surface of the ball.
Remember they are bouncing electrons off the sample to make the picture. Like charges repel (negative in this case) so the electrons bounce off as soon as they get very close to another electron. That's why you see a picture of the electron clouds of the atoms. The atoms "reflect" the incoming electrons the way a big ship bounces radar signals. You see the outline of the ship (or the electron cloud) as the case may be.
As far as using different wavelengths of light, there are already experimental systems that do this. They don't do it for data processing, just for transmission, and they get some ungodly bandwidth, like 100 GB over standard fibre.
It's not too different from spread-spectrum wireless broadcasting.
"We don't need a force probe to look at the atoms." We can just take a normal electron micrograph and then hand - COUNT the number and position of the atoms from the picture. Quite a powerful tool for data collection!"
"Writing is harder because those damn atoms are so small, and they like to move around. If we get them REALLY cold they stay still. Much, much, much colder than a brass monkey's balls, a well-digger's ass, or a witch's teat.":"In summary, if you have two kinds of electron microscopes, and gallons of liquid nitrogen, you don't mind the bits/hour transfer rates, and the 256 bit memory size, well, then THIS IS A MONUMENTAL BREAKTHROUGH! And I *am tired* of hearing about those IBM jokers who scratched graffitti using the same tech 5 years ago."
TROLL?! You fucking people are idiots. You can't understand that these "scientists" are just moving atoms around the way you move your coffee cup on a table. BIG FUCKING DEAL. Gawd why do I ever post here? The IQ of the people in charge should be measured in Kelvins.
Here's my bet. I can FORGE 3 press releases that Slashdot will pick up in the next three months. That is how fucking stupid you people are. You can't tell science from science-fiction. You probably don't even know what an electron microscope IS.
I am not kidding, IBM did this 5 years ago, who gives a fuck if they can move atoms with an electron microscope?! That is exactly what this variety of EM does! Am I supposed to be impressed by the fact that they made atom-sized channels?
You people are jackasses, plain and simple. You probably own miles of swampland in florida and a medicine cabinet full of penis enlargement pills.
.. to state the obvious. This is about as revolutionary as using an egg carton for data storage. You move the eggs around to different places to indicate the data value. If you have a dozen egg cartons, you have 144 bits.
Whoopee! The only difference is the scale. I guess the scientist were surprised to find that the atoms stayed where they were left? I imagine that if I licked my finger and rubbed it over their "egg carton", that would be the end of their data.
So someone found a way to spend a lot of time using the electron microscope. I remember when some IBM staffers wrote "IBM" with single atoms. Maybe 5 years ago. Hopefully they patented the "technology".
The relentless slagging this "news" has received so far is heartily deserved.
I don't know exactly what you're trying to say here, but I assure you that if you mix NaCl, H2O, and electricity, you will get H2 and O2. I've seen the bubbles rising from the ends of my wires many times. They are not bubbles of sodium hydroxide or "hypochlorous" acid. They are gasses.
You might get the products you discussed in some trace amounts, but the overall production is gas, and there are a lot of Na and Cl ions in the water. If you don't believe me, taste it. I promise it doesn't taste like soap or metal.
Great, maybe you can join the TIPS program, or CitizenWatch, or just annoy the hell out of your local police by calling them whenever anyone uses a computer in your lab.
It's Ebay's problem, not yours. You're already wildly underpaid, do you really feel it's your responsibility to protect Ebay's credit card accounting? It's not.
Criminal stuff is happening all around you, all the time. If you can prevent it, or assist in prosecuting the perpetrators, great. But when your "assistance" means *assuming that everyone will commit a crime* and recording their identities *before the crime is committed*, well, now you are, in my mind, much worse than the Ebay hacker.
He's only ripping off Ebay, you're assuming that every library patron is a criminal.
if you really just want a small, flat display, you can get them from Ebay very cheaply. I think gluing one to the side of your tower would be much cooler than these LCD things.
How many times is/. going to run this item? I know I read something virtually identical here recently.
Great, so kids will remain interested in school for a short time if we GIVE them a $400 present? How about a $300 desktop? As long as we are bribing, let's do it as cheaply as possible...
Seriously, there is no question that having *some kind* of computing device is interesting for young students, and it can be extremely helpful. But if you think the Dana is the best use of your $400/student, you are probably an elderly school administrator (sorry).
And maybe your Mom (oh someone had to say it) should reconsider her teaching effetiveness if a little screen and keyboard suddenly drive her students to new performance levels?
As posted above, you can get a Lindows desktop machine from WalMart for $300. Why would anyone buy this POS when WallyWorld will sell them a real computer for 25 percent less?
Slashdot ran a piece on the Lindows machine a couple days ago, but you can find it on the Wal-Mart web site. Or hell, just go down there an see for yourself.
I am a teacher, too, and this Dana is incredibly over-priced and under-powered.
I'm losing my faith in Slashdot - who decided this was newsworthy? Two days ago there was a GREAT piece here about a Lindows machine from WalMart for $300. If we are talking about schools, what school wouldn't want a full desktop system (not powerful or fast, but very functional) for ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS LESS than this Speak-and-Spell on steroids?
I shudder to think that any school administrator would see these boat anchors as a good buy. But some of them probably will...
You can't check these "portables" out to the students because they cost FOUR HUNDRED dollars each. In fact, you can't even let them carry the machine around from class to class. There's just too much money involved. So you put them on table or desk, where a *real* computer should be sitting, and tell the students that computers have made typewriters obsolete. There are some snickers, and some joker whose father owns a pawnshop hauls out an Olivetti from 1980 that does almost everything your FOUR HUNDRED dollar boat-anchor does. And the kid bought it for 5 bucks.
Meanwhile, Crosstown Grammar School has just covered a classroom with Lindows machines with a full set of apps and mega-compatibility for 25% less than you.
I can't remember where I read it (maybe here, maybe ScienceDaily), but the real news is that some female scientist made a nanoscale magnet with an electron microscope that was incredibly strong. As soon as some chemical genius figures out a way to mass-produce the atomic structure (instead of building one-atom-at-a-time), we can levitate really heavy things without using any electricity at all.
Again, that pathetic photo of the "train" being lifted by a crane onto a Disneyland monorail track was too much. Who picks this stuff?
Gingivitis is the toothpaste-equivalent. Once, just once, I want to see someone who "let their Gingivitus run wild" and no longer has any visible gums.
Or how about those hooks you can buy to hang your brooms? Did you ever see a broom destroyed by resting on the floor? Me either.
They invent the problem, then they invent the solution.
I also read the serial version (it was in Analog) and found it to be mostly crap. The Neanderthals are all bisexual. They control their population buy allowing opposite sexes to meet only a few days each month. All the Neanderthal women ovulate (and menstrate) at the same time.
And of course, they live in an eco-paradise. The Neanderthal homes are some kind of biologically sculpted trees. They have a dangerously small population that has somehow survived millenia without being wiped out by disease (apparently the Black Plague missed their quantum reality. It killed 25% of the world's population in ours). They won't eat carbohydrates, only meat (I think) and "fresh fruit and vegetables".
In short, it's a laughable and completely implausible fantasy about all the things that a far-left hippie imagines would make a better life. That includes the selective breeding program that has (almost) removed violent tendencies from the Neanderthal race.
Did I mention the homo sapiens female characters in the story? One is a French bombshell and the other is a rape victim. The rape victim requires a total of perhaps 1 week to develop a strong interest in screwing a particular Neanderthal.
The whole thing is really a pile of junk. If it presented a more realistic culture with some internal consistency, if it presented a believable or appealing cast of characters, and if it it wasn't sodden with "free love", "eco-harmony", and eugenics, it could have been an interesting idea.
Am I the only one who feels that sci-fi is running out of ideas? We get so many alternate-history and alternate-reality stories these days. How about a story from a future version of *this* universe?
One of the key phrases here is "non-commercial use". If I put an mp3 up on any P2P network, I am not gaining one dime. In fact, I am, in some sense, paying to distribute the mp3, because people are using my bandwidth.
"Non-commercial use" merely requires that I don't profit from my ownership of art created by others. It certainly doesn't cover how I obtained that work. Being a thief has nothing, inherently, to do with copyright laws.
The reason we are seeing this RIAA spasm is not because someone else is profiting by selling their music over P2P. It is because *they are not profiting*. All the legislation is motivated by greed, and has no relation to Fair Use or copyrights. They simply can't stand to see a new world where their business model doesn't work anymore. They'd rather instill a totalitarian society into law than change with the landscape.
Remember, as long as you don't earn cash for sharing your mp3s, you are NOT doing anything illegal. If your friend chooses to give you a copy of any mp3 he/she owns, for FREE, it is completely within fair use. That doesn't change whether you are exchanging cassette tapes off the radio from 1979, or an mp3 of Celine Dion over the internet.
There is no question that current laws were created in a completely different environment of information. But until the laws are changed, there is no legal reason to limit your Fair Use. Only you can decide if you feel guilty or not. There is no law preventing you from file-sharing at this time.
> Nobody complains when guitarists rip off each others licks
Well they may not pass laws against it, but they do complain. Remember when Eddie Van Halen was the King? And suddenly 1,000,000 guitarists did everything possible to sound like him? Heck, even Yngwie Malmsteen inadvertantly created a clone army of neoclassical metal guitarists.
If your friends were like me and my friends, we turned our noses up at all the bandwagon jumpers. A few musicians learned from these innovators and took music to the next place. But they offered their own ideas and interpretations.
The relevance to rapping and copyright-in-general is that all that shoddy cloning and mimicry generally doesn't sell for crap, at least not compared to the original. A typical rap collage doesn't sound enough like any of the component samples to even be comparable. That's why it's interesting and possibly saleable.
Let the art market decide the value of originality and new ideas. They always sell better than a rehash of someone else's inspiration.
I don't know the exact physics but I seem to recall that larger platters don't net extra storage. The reason is the difference in speed between the tracks on the outside edge and the tracks in the center. The outside tracks go faster, and as the radius of the disk increases, they go too fast for the head mechanism to compensate.
Maybe they'll make some big breakthrough in speed compensation, but until then, it's easier to just stack more platters like dishes than to make bigger platters.
I'm sure many readers can remember the old "software vendor" chain called Software Pipeline. They had stores all over the US (maybe elsewhere too, I don't know).
Yes, you could buy the software, but no one ever did. Because you could *rent* it for a day or two for a few bucks, and then bring it back. They always made sure the manuals were in good condition, and they even had a nice, unsupervised photocopy machine right in the store.
Combine this with your favorite cracking software, and you have pure gold. Unfortunately, they were wiped out by heavy legal fire from a number of entities (as I recall). So the idea has been tried, long before music and the RIAA were a computer issue, and it couldn't even survive under the old, reasonable laws.
Now, a moment of silence, please, for one of the greatest, shortest-lived ideas of the eighties.
Slashdot Mirror
Must be the same moderator. Get a fucking clue, you loser. There's a reason this topic is deserted. It's a combination of a really stupid news item and an even-more-stupid moderator. Perhaps you would consider just *educating yourself past second grade* before rating information you can't possibly understand?
Wow you must be the guy who offered up this gem, huh?
I'd like to hear the genius moderators explain the size savings when the include the these items in the "storage device":
1. Vaccum pump to maintain data integrity.
2. Liquid nitrogen cooling system to maintain data integrity
3. Scanning EM to read the data.
4. EM force probe to write the data.
Let's see, that should all fit in... a two car garage.
Let's compare to an abacus:
1. human being and way to get them food
2. abacus
That should easily fit in a one-car garage, and it works 1000s of times faster.
Relative cost? Maybe 10 USD for the abacus startup, and 10 USD per hour for the operator. Throw in food (we are GOOD employers) and you go up to maybe 13 USD per hour.
Okay, maybe 300, 000 USD for each of the EM, 80, 000 USD for the cooling system, 20,000 USD for the vaccuum system. So that's about 700,000 startup. Then you have the electriciy costs for the EMs, not trivial.
At this rate, the genius atomic memory becomes cost effective (it never becomes time-effective or space-effective) in about 50,000 years.
So yeah, I am an idiot, someone give me 700,000 an free electricity so I can take advantage of this bits/hour tech!!!!
Exactly. Verry slow at present but being able to keep the atoms where they were put is a step towards a viable atomic storage.
I was trying to think of some reason this was news. That was the only reason I could think of. It's really not much of a reason.
And to reiterate, the problem is NOT the temperature! The problem is that NO ONE KNOWS how to move those atoms OR read those atoms AT any meaningful speed. If you want super-small data storage whose transfer rates are measured in bits/hour, you've found your system!
Until someone *thinks of an idea" (because no such idea has been supposed with any more reality than a photon torpedo) for how to do this, it's just guys futzing with their EM. And that is hardly worthy as news.
As for the TROLL rating, fuck Slashdot's stupid fucking articles and their stupid fucking moderators. You will see my point when they post my first raudulent press release as an item.
The responses are perfectly matched to the quality of the original item.
Okay there is one more difference. I can move eggs in the cartons at the rate of maybe 20/min, and the cost is the price of the eggs.
You can have your "memory device" and several million dollars of lab equipment, and you can perform the same operation at maybe 5/hour.
So I am moving the data 360 times faster for 0.000000000001 times the cost.
Also, we have this thing called transistor memory, it has actually been around for a while, and it makes both these crackheaded schemes foolish. Maybe you've heard of it?
My point is: There is way to move the atoms, OR detect their positions, in any manner that could be considered useful or reasonable. Further, there is NO PLAN OR IDEA for how this could be accomplished. No one is "working on" a system to do this, because no one has *an idea of how to do this*.
I am not saying it will never happen, but I am saying it will not happen in your children's lifetimes.
And the additional added feature of "working" in some meaningful sense. It will take maybe 100 years and a few phenomenal tech breakthroughs before this "idea" is even remotely practical.
It's just some guys futzing with their electron microscope!!!! They are moving the "bits" ONE BY ONE BY HAND! Am I supposed to consider this a "memory device"? A pencil and paper is 10,000 times faster.
Well if you read the article, they evaporated gold on silicon and then more silicon on that. That is the substrate ("what is under them").
The reason it looks so flat is because you get a picture of an electron cloud from an electron microscope. You can't see the nucleus, it's a tiny point inside that fuzzy mess of electrons. So when you pack a bunch of conducting or semi-conducting atoms together, their electron clouds all join up, electrons go promiscuously from atom to atom, and the net appearance is one giant, flat electron cloud.
If you could somehow do a 3-D picture of a tiny ball of gold, it would just look like a sphere, because the electrons are all shared, and they would spread out evenly over the surface of the ball.
Remember they are bouncing electrons off the sample to make the picture. Like charges repel (negative in this case) so the electrons bounce off as soon as they get very close to another electron. That's why you see a picture of the electron clouds of the atoms. The atoms "reflect" the incoming electrons the way a big ship bounces radar signals. You see the outline of the ship (or the electron cloud) as the case may be.
As far as using different wavelengths of light, there are already experimental systems that do this. They don't do it for data processing, just for transmission, and they get some ungodly bandwidth, like 100 GB over standard fibre.
It's not too different from spread-spectrum wireless broadcasting.
Let me translate:
:"In summary, if you have two kinds of electron microscopes, and gallons of liquid nitrogen, you don't mind the bits/hour transfer rates, and the 256 bit memory size, well, then THIS IS A MONUMENTAL BREAKTHROUGH! And I *am tired* of hearing about those IBM jokers who scratched graffitti using the same tech 5 years ago."
"We don't need a force probe to look at the atoms." We can just take a normal electron micrograph and then hand - COUNT the number and position of the atoms from the picture. Quite a powerful tool for data collection!"
"Writing is harder because those damn atoms are so small, and they like to move around. If we get them REALLY cold they stay still. Much, much, much colder than a brass monkey's balls, a well-digger's ass, or a witch's teat."
TROLL?! You fucking people are idiots. You can't understand that these "scientists" are just moving atoms around the way you move your coffee cup on a table. BIG FUCKING DEAL. Gawd why do I ever post here? The IQ of the people in charge should be measured in Kelvins.
Here's my bet. I can FORGE 3 press releases that Slashdot will pick up in the next three months. That is how fucking stupid you people are. You can't tell science from science-fiction. You probably don't even know what an electron microscope IS.
I am not kidding, IBM did this 5 years ago, who gives a fuck if they can move atoms with an electron microscope?! That is exactly what this variety of EM does! Am I supposed to be impressed by the fact that they made atom-sized channels?
You people are jackasses, plain and simple. You probably own miles of swampland in florida and a medicine cabinet full of penis enlargement pills.
.. to state the obvious. This is about as revolutionary as using an egg carton for data storage. You move the eggs around to different places to indicate the data value. If you have a dozen egg cartons, you have 144 bits.
Whoopee! The only difference is the scale. I guess the scientist were surprised to find that the atoms stayed where they were left? I imagine that if I licked my finger and rubbed it over their "egg carton", that would be the end of their data.
So someone found a way to spend a lot of time using the electron microscope. I remember when some IBM staffers wrote "IBM" with single atoms. Maybe 5 years ago. Hopefully they patented the "technology".
The relentless slagging this "news" has received so far is heartily deserved.
I don't know exactly what you're trying to say here, but I assure you that if you mix NaCl, H2O, and electricity, you will get H2 and O2. I've seen the bubbles rising from the ends of my wires many times. They are not bubbles of sodium hydroxide or "hypochlorous" acid. They are gasses.
You might get the products you discussed in some trace amounts, but the overall production is gas, and there are a lot of Na and Cl ions in the water. If you don't believe me, taste it. I promise it doesn't taste like soap or metal.
Great, maybe you can join the TIPS program, or CitizenWatch, or just annoy the hell out of your local police by calling them whenever anyone uses a computer in your lab.
It's Ebay's problem, not yours. You're already wildly underpaid, do you really feel it's your responsibility to protect Ebay's credit card accounting? It's not.
Criminal stuff is happening all around you, all the time. If you can prevent it, or assist in prosecuting the perpetrators, great. But when your "assistance" means *assuming that everyone will commit a crime* and recording their identities *before the crime is committed*, well, now you are, in my mind, much worse than the Ebay hacker.
He's only ripping off Ebay, you're assuming that every library patron is a criminal.
if you really just want a small, flat display, you can get them from Ebay very cheaply. I think gluing one to the side of your tower would be much cooler than these LCD things.
/. going to run this item? I know I read something virtually identical here recently.
How many times is
Great, so kids will remain interested in school for a short time if we GIVE them a $400 present? How about a $300 desktop? As long as we are bribing, let's do it as cheaply as possible...
Seriously, there is no question that having *some kind* of computing device is interesting for young students, and it can be extremely helpful. But if you think the Dana is the best use of your $400/student, you are probably an elderly school administrator (sorry).
And maybe your Mom (oh someone had to say it) should reconsider her teaching effetiveness if a little screen and keyboard suddenly drive her students to new performance levels?
As posted above, you can get a Lindows desktop machine from WalMart for $300. Why would anyone buy this POS when WallyWorld will sell them a real computer for 25 percent less?
Slashdot ran a piece on the Lindows machine a couple days ago, but you can find it on the Wal-Mart web site. Or hell, just go down there an see for yourself.
I am a teacher, too, and this Dana is incredibly over-priced and under-powered.
I'm losing my faith in Slashdot - who decided this was newsworthy? Two days ago there was a GREAT piece here about a Lindows machine from WalMart for $300. If we are talking about schools, what school wouldn't want a full desktop system (not powerful or fast, but very functional) for ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS LESS than this Speak-and-Spell on steroids?
I shudder to think that any school administrator would see these boat anchors as a good buy. But some of them probably will...
You can't check these "portables" out to the students because they cost FOUR HUNDRED dollars each. In fact, you can't even let them carry the machine around from class to class. There's just too much money involved. So you put them on table or desk, where a *real* computer should be sitting, and tell the students that computers have made typewriters obsolete. There are some snickers, and some joker whose father owns a pawnshop hauls out an Olivetti from 1980 that does almost everything your FOUR HUNDRED dollar boat-anchor does. And the kid bought it for 5 bucks.
Meanwhile, Crosstown Grammar School has just covered a classroom with Lindows machines with a full set of apps and mega-compatibility for 25% less than you.
Who picks this junk?
I can't remember where I read it (maybe here, maybe ScienceDaily), but the real news is that some female scientist made a nanoscale magnet with an electron microscope that was incredibly strong. As soon as some chemical genius figures out a way to mass-produce the atomic structure (instead of building one-atom-at-a-time), we can levitate really heavy things without using any electricity at all.
Again, that pathetic photo of the "train" being lifted by a crane onto a Disneyland monorail track was too much. Who picks this stuff?
Gingivitis is the toothpaste-equivalent. Once, just once, I want to see someone who "let their Gingivitus run wild" and no longer has any visible gums.
Or how about those hooks you can buy to hang your brooms? Did you ever see a broom destroyed by resting on the floor? Me either.
They invent the problem, then they invent the solution.
I also read the serial version (it was in Analog) and found it to be mostly crap. The Neanderthals are all bisexual. They control their population buy allowing opposite sexes to meet only a few days each month. All the Neanderthal women ovulate (and menstrate) at the same time.
And of course, they live in an eco-paradise. The Neanderthal homes are some kind of biologically sculpted trees. They have a dangerously small population that has somehow survived millenia without being wiped out by disease (apparently the Black Plague missed their quantum reality. It killed 25% of the world's population in ours). They won't eat carbohydrates, only meat (I think) and "fresh fruit and vegetables".
In short, it's a laughable and completely implausible fantasy about all the things that a far-left hippie imagines would make a better life. That includes the selective breeding program that has (almost) removed violent tendencies from the Neanderthal race.
Did I mention the homo sapiens female characters in the story? One is a French bombshell and the other is a rape victim. The rape victim requires a total of perhaps 1 week to develop a strong interest in screwing a particular Neanderthal.
The whole thing is really a pile of junk. If it presented a more realistic culture with some internal consistency, if it presented a believable or appealing cast of characters, and if it it wasn't sodden with "free love", "eco-harmony", and eugenics, it could have been an interesting idea.
Am I the only one who feels that sci-fi is running out of ideas? We get so many alternate-history and alternate-reality stories these days. How about a story from a future version of *this* universe?
One of the key phrases here is "non-commercial use". If I put an mp3 up on any P2P network, I am not gaining one dime. In fact, I am, in some sense, paying to distribute the mp3, because people are using my bandwidth.
"Non-commercial use" merely requires that I don't profit from my ownership of art created by others. It certainly doesn't cover how I obtained that work. Being a thief has nothing, inherently, to do with copyright laws.
The reason we are seeing this RIAA spasm is not because someone else is profiting by selling their music over P2P. It is because *they are not profiting*. All the legislation is motivated by greed, and has no relation to Fair Use or copyrights. They simply can't stand to see a new world where their business model doesn't work anymore. They'd rather instill a totalitarian society into law than change with the landscape.
Remember, as long as you don't earn cash for sharing your mp3s, you are NOT doing anything illegal. If your friend chooses to give you a copy of any mp3 he/she owns, for FREE, it is completely within fair use. That doesn't change whether you are exchanging cassette tapes off the radio from 1979, or an mp3 of Celine Dion over the internet.
There is no question that current laws were created in a completely different environment of information. But until the laws are changed, there is no legal reason to limit your Fair Use. Only you can decide if you feel guilty or not. There is no law preventing you from file-sharing at this time.
> Nobody complains when guitarists rip off each others licks
Well they may not pass laws against it, but they do complain. Remember when Eddie Van Halen was the King? And suddenly 1,000,000 guitarists did everything possible to sound like him? Heck, even Yngwie Malmsteen inadvertantly created a clone army of neoclassical metal guitarists.
If your friends were like me and my friends, we turned our noses up at all the bandwagon jumpers. A few musicians learned from these innovators and took music to the next place. But they offered their own ideas and interpretations.
The relevance to rapping and copyright-in-general is that all that shoddy cloning and mimicry generally doesn't sell for crap, at least not compared to the original. A typical rap collage doesn't sound enough like any of the component samples to even be comparable. That's why it's interesting and possibly saleable.
Let the art market decide the value of originality and new ideas. They always sell better than a rehash of someone else's inspiration.
Given the choice between units created by the French, and units created by anyone else, you'd have to choose...
Anyone else.
LMAO
You are un-officially modded to 11.
I don't know the exact physics but I seem to recall that larger platters don't net extra storage. The reason is the difference in speed between the tracks on the outside edge and the tracks in the center. The outside tracks go faster, and as the radius of the disk increases, they go too fast for the head mechanism to compensate.
Maybe they'll make some big breakthrough in speed compensation, but until then, it's easier to just stack more platters like dishes than to make bigger platters.
I'm sure many readers can remember the old "software vendor" chain called Software Pipeline. They had stores all over the US (maybe elsewhere too, I don't know).
Yes, you could buy the software, but no one ever did. Because you could *rent* it for a day or two for a few bucks, and then bring it back. They always made sure the manuals were in good condition, and they even had a nice, unsupervised photocopy machine right in the store.
Combine this with your favorite cracking software, and you have pure gold. Unfortunately, they were wiped out by heavy legal fire from a number of entities (as I recall). So the idea has been tried, long before music and the RIAA were a computer issue, and it couldn't even survive under the old, reasonable laws.
Now, a moment of silence, please, for one of the greatest, shortest-lived ideas of the eighties.