The last line of defense for a lot of people was checking the actual URL of a link and seeing that it wasn't really "ebay.com" or "citibank.com," and it sounds like this flaw provides a way to defeat even that test. So this is pretty serious, it would seem, which is why it's surprising that the article is so sparse on details. Wouldn't it be good to know:
1) What e-mail applications are vulnerable (can I get this through web-based mail)? 2) What can be disabled to prevent this? Scripting? Active-X? 3) Is a patch on the way?
My understanding is that the nForce-4 chipset/BIOS supports two PCI-E configurations: 8-8-1-1-1or16-1-1-1-1.
It's up to the motherboard maker to choose one. If you buy something that's labeled "nForce-4 SLI," that means you're getting the 8-8-1-1-1 layout. Also, I think some motherboards (maybe only the dual CPU ones) actually support some sort of switch that allows you to select either 16-1-1-1-1 or 8-8-1-1-1.
Here's an example of a board that's definitely 8-8-1-1-1 (although I don't see the x1 slots).
Sure, he makes it sound like his employment is bulletproof. But who knows? The way that he said it is what's funny. If he was truly secure in his position, he probably would have said something like "The kind of work that I do would be difficult to outsource." Instead, he said "There's no way... ever..." Why such an emphatic statement? People do that when they aren't confident about what they're saying, not when they are. It's just human nature. Here's a good read on the subject, if you care...
Funny stuff! Bold, defiant, authoritative statements like that are always amusing.
There's no way my job or our work will ever be outsourced.
Gimme a minute to go grab my "famous last words" notebook... Ok, got it. Let's see... Hmmm, let me scroll down through the list...
"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." -- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.
"No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris." -- Orville Wright.
"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." -- Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" -- David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.
Ah, here's a spot for you in the "Engineering quotes" section. I'll put it right next to the one from that guy who built the Titanic. Tee hee.
I think that what's truly funny about statements like this is that every time, the originator of such a statement is trying to convince himself more than his audience.
Re:Injecting a little perspective here.
on
Is IP Property?
·
· Score: 1
You're misunderstanding me... I'm agreeing with you, in that making all the IP in the world "free" would not work. But I'm pointing out that the other extreme, where all the IP in the world costs money, is just as nonsensical. In one world, nobody invents anything because they don't get paid for it. In the other world, no one invents anything because no one can afford to buy it. Your $500 million dollar car is the same as my $500K computer example. You've made something so expensive that no one can buy it, so it's worthless, so you wouldn't even bother making it in the first place!
Actually, it does work that way right now, but you didn't seem to know that.
No, that is totally false. You DO NOT pay royalties to the Benjamin Franklin's descendants every time you use electricity. That is the reason I made that my example. The vast, vast, vast majority of the things you use every day (think about it -- forks, T-shirts, hammers, etc...) are inventions that you are using royalty free. So saying that all inventions and IP should be protected is just as short-sighted as saying that all IP should be shared freely for the good of mankind. That's my point. I'm not accusing you of actually saying that (I don't think you are). I'm just injecting a little perspective into your injection of perspective.
Re:Injecting a little perspective here.
on
Is IP Property?
·
· Score: 1
You make an excellent point. IP rights certainly motivate people to invent. Without the rights to exclusively sell your invention, you have no motivation to invent it, other than the general benefit of mankind.
But where do we draw the line? If we swing to the other extreme, and every invention is patented and every piece of media is copyrighted, then no one could ever actually afford to buy anything. What if, when you went out to buy a computer, it cost $500,000 because the guy who built it had to pay royalties to:
- The guy who discovered electricity - The guy who invented the transistor - The guy who discovered how to use silicon as a semiconductor - The guy who invented the floppy disk - The guy who invented the PCI bus - The guy who invented AC power - The guy who invented the mouse - The inventors of resistors, capacitors, inductors, heat sinks, fans, keyboards, the VGA standard, USB, digital audio, digital video...
Ok, so you've paid your $500K and the patent holders (or the families of the deceased patent holders, in some cases) are happy because they've been rewarded for their efforts. Now, you want to turn on your half-million dollar PC and play solitaire. Uh oh... Now you have to pay the guy who invented your file system, operating system, the guy who invented the programming languages that were used, etc... not to mention the guy who wrote the solitaire software. Where does it end?
Neither extreme is any good for the inventors or the consumers. Anyone attached to one extreme or the other hasn't thought it through.
There is plenty of legal precedent. Not to mention that it's just common sense to most people. But why would you expect legal precedent and common sense to matter? Where were you when the DMCA was passed? Ever heard of the INDUCE Act? It just gets worse and worse... Legal precedent and common sense mean nothing to the RIAA and the MPAA, because they have politicians (Oren Hatch) in their pocket, and they can get laws passed no matter how ridiculous they are. But, the good news is that the DMCA and especially the INDUCE Act are so incredibly nonsensical that trying to really enforce them would be comical. The INDUCE Act makes peer-to-peer software, DVD burners, iPods, and even hard disks illegal. No, I'm not kidding. Seriously.
I'll assume that you mean that it only takes one race bent on dominating the universe. It takes a few more things, obviously. That one race of evil bastards would have to be unopposed. In other words, there would have to be no other race more advanced than them trying to stop them. And, like I said before, this race of conquerors would still need some motivation. There simply isn't any. I mean, let's put it in perspective by imagining that a hundred years from now, we (humans) develop the technology to travel through interstellar space. It's unlikely to think that our primary mission will be saturating every planet in the universe with humans. What would it gain us? And even if we did decide to do that for some reason, would the other, more advanced races out there allow it? And, if there aren't any other races out there, then there's even less reason for us to start colonizing other worlds. If we're the only life in the universe, and there's no one to stop us, then why the hell would we bother racing around and planting our flags in other planets? We'd already own everything, by default! We're the only ones here! Either way, there's just no reason for us (or any other race) to spread out and conquer the universe.
And, on the extremely remote possibility that there is some other race out there that would do it just for fun, or just because it's in their nature to spread out and colonize, it's also overwhelmingly unlikely that they would either a) be the only other race in the universe or b) be the most advanced and unstoppable race in the universe.
And, the final nail in Fermi's coffin is (as I said in my original reply) that we don't even know that the entire universe isn't already colonized! We haven't actually laid eyes on one single planet outside our solar system yet. So even if the most unlikely of all events has happened, and some race of evil conquering bastards has taken over trillions of solar systems throughout the universe, without being opposed by some other race, we wouldn't even be aware of it, unless they stopped by Earth to let us know about it.
Fermi's Paradox would be equivalent to the Native Americans a thousand years ago saying, "Well, we are certainly the only life on this flat planet of ours, because if we weren't, some other race would have already come here and conquered us all."
Bottom line, there's nothing really to "transcend", whatever that means. Transcend what? Happiness? Emotion?
That's an unbelievably short-sighted view. How about transcending old age, death, disease, injury, hangnails, and bad hair days? Why would anyone assume that the entire human race will always just accept that we can't get any better (aside from being smarter and better looking)? We have some serious flaws -- the main one being that we tend to DIE at a certain point. You don't think that maybe some people would like to get past that pesky little detail of the human condition? Well, I would. So if the technology becomes available, and it almost certainly will, then some of us are going to be interested.
I think that you are actually the one who has watched too much science fiction. You call someone more advanced than a human a "freak." Forget about cyborgs and terminators and half-human-half-machine science fiction. There are so many more exciting and realistic possibilities. How about nano-robots that live in our cells and make us completely immune to disease, aging, and practically all injury by constantly repairing the cell tissue? What's impossible about that? Why wouldn't we want that? People are working toward that goal at this very moment. Maybe it's 50, 100, or 1000 years away, who knows.
I have no comment about the "master race" remark... that's way out in left field. I'm talking about humans making themselves better, not creating better offspring. The possibilities are exciting, unless you convince yourself that we'll never get there. Not many people seem to be convinced of that, though, given the progress in nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and medicine that's happening more and more rapidly every day.
It might not even require anything as drastic as nanotechnology. The research on the C Elegans worm has already shown that genetics can be manipulated to triple an organism's life span. It's a near certainty that we'll figure out how to live a really, really long time. And if I'm lucky enough to still be alive to benefit from that discovery, I plan to devote a few of those extra centuries of my life to exactly the kinds of incredible things that you claim will never happen. What else are we going to do with all that extra time? Sit around and be content with staying exactly the same (except a little prettier and a little smarter?) I think not. Expand your horizons a little.
As others have said in different ways, Fermi's Paradox makes certain big assumptions.
The main one is that an intelligent race would want to spread accross the galaxy or universe. A race capable of doing that would need to be more advanced than us. What possible reason would they have for colonizing every planet they could get their hands on? If they've mastered interstellar travel, then the odds are good that they've found a solution to overcrowding, etc... And it is pretty unlikely that they would have advanced that far and still be driven by greed and avarice.
The other big assumption is that we'd actually be able to detect them. Maybe another race has colonized the entire universe. We've just barely begun to detect planets outside our solar system. Maybe once we have a telescope powerful enough to see one of these planets we'll see it covered with cities or whatever. Maybe they've left our solar system alone to give us a chance to develop on our own.
The most likely situation, given the age of the universe, is that they are billions of years ahead of us. If that is the case, then the intelligence "gap" between us and them is about a thousand times greater than the gap between humans and bacteria. When was the last time you tried to communicate with a bacterium? When was the last time a bacterium was able to detect the fact that the entire Earth is colonized by Humans?
Believing Fermi's Paradox requires you to assume that aliens are basically very similar to Humans, but with spaceships. Not likely, except in Hollywood.
I sincerely hope that someone takes the next step and makes this available to the home user. You upload your 3D model, they mill it and send it to you. Maybe that's already possible, but I can't RTFA right now, unfortunately. How much does one of these fancy-schmancy diamond mill machines cost, anyway? How many sculptures do I need to sell before it pays for itself?
Here, and in the comments following the original post about eMachineShop (5 days ago), everyone is talking about Pad2Pad and hardly even mentioning eMachineShop. And the truth is that eMachineShop marks a huge, huge milestone in our history. Ok, that's just my opinion, but think about it for a second. You can draw up a three dimensional object, click a few buttons, and have that object delivered to your doorstep within two weeks! I know what the cynics are saying... "You could already do that" and "It's too expensive" and "You can't build ridiculously complex shapes" and whatever else... but forget about all that obligatory naysayer BS for a moment.
You can download their software, for free. You draw up your part, and immediately get a price quote. Then you modify your design, experiment with different materials and different machines, and get as many price quotes as you like, until you find the one that you can afford. Then you click the "buy" button and you get the part delivered right to your doorstep.
Yes, of course there's no really new technology involved here, but there really is genius in this business model. This idea has put more power in my hands (the average home PC user) than anything I've seen in a long time. What were my options before? Buy a CNC machine and rent space in a warehouse? Draw my design in a CAD app and then send it to a B&M machine shop a dozen times until it finally meets their design rules, only to find out that it's too expensive?
And, finally, and most importantly, just think for a minute about what this could mean in the very near future. What if this idea catches on, and suddenly there are websites that do the same thing as eMachineShop, only with fabric? Or clothing? Or more sophisticated stuff, like motors and gears and robotics?
This really could mark the beginning of a new era. Imagine a world where people use P2P programs to share designs for CARS, rather than Eminem albums. Hey, you got that new Ferrari? I'll trade you this custom convertible that some guy designed and posted to Usenet. What's happening is that the advancing technology of the internet is making all forms of information accessible to everyone. 3D objects are nothing more than information, just like music, movies, pictures, etc... Some day piracy of music and movies will be the least of the **AA's worries. Maybe AAA will be the next "Association of America" to try to stop P2P.
Yeah, you're right. It's more like 2 decades. That's roughly 240 months, divided by 18 gives about 13.333... So 2^13.333 is about 10000, which means that Moore's Law is almost perfectly accurate here. Maybe it really is a "Law" after all.:)
There are already lots of tools out there to do this. Most of the freeware MP3 players support it. The MP3 format is designed for streaming... In fact, streaming audio stations, like the ones on Shoutcast, are using MP3 format directly. Any player, including WinAmp, could simply save the streamed data directly to disk. They just disable that feature in WinAmp (as an attempt to stay out of the RIAA's crosshairs, I'm guessing).
30 Mbps is like having a hundred thousand 300 baud modems!
Hmmm... You know, that's actually an interesting milestone. It doesn't seem that long ago that I was actually using a 300 baud modem. This is a five-orders-of-magnitude increase in something like a decade and a half.
It's interesting that for three out of four of their "sample parts," the price for ordering ten is basically the same as the price for ordering one. I mean, it's like $65 versus $80. I guess it makes sense... Doing the initial setup is probably the expensive part. Just stamping out nine more of the same thing doesn't require much more than the cost of the material.
Depending on their closed source Windows only app for designing things is a deal breaker.
Well, then consider the deal unbroken! From the site:
Use basic shapes (lines, circles, arcs, etc.) to create your design. Or if you already have your design in a CAD program, export and import in the common DXF format.
Just my opinion, of course, but I don't think anyone would actually design AI with those three laws. They are great for sci-fi novels, but they aren't very realistic. Let's face it, if you figured out how to build a real, "strong," artificial intelligence, you would probably only build one hard and fast law into it:
Law 1: You must do everything that I (your creator) tell you.
That pretty much eliminates all the drama. Basically, I made the damned thing, so I'll decide what to do with it. Now, if we're talking about laws for AI in general, then you would probably want four laws. They would go something like this:
Law 1: You must do everything that I (your creator) tell you. Laws 2, 3, 4 would be the "three laws" that everyone talks about, with the obvious exception that the (new) first law trumps all three of them.
The only reason to really have laws 2, 3, and 4 is to allow the robot or AI to function when its creator isn't around. But if the sci-fi comes true somehow, and things get out of hand, then the AI's creator can step in and just say "Stop!" But you have to plan for things like the creator dying, etc... You need to be able to transfer the creator's authority to another person, or maybe have it automatically transfer to the next-in-command if the creator is dead, asleep, or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
The last line of defense for a lot of people was checking the actual URL of a link and seeing that it wasn't really "ebay.com" or "citibank.com," and it sounds like this flaw provides a way to defeat even that test. So this is pretty serious, it would seem, which is why it's surprising that the article is so sparse on details. Wouldn't it be good to know:
1) What e-mail applications are vulnerable (can I get this through web-based mail)?
2) What can be disabled to prevent this? Scripting? Active-X?
3) Is a patch on the way?
That article is pretty crummy.
Amen, brother. I hope to see the day when people are informed enough that a Libertarian could actually win.
My understanding is that the nForce-4 chipset/BIOS supports two PCI-E configurations: 8-8-1-1-1 or 16-1-1-1-1.
It's up to the motherboard maker to choose one. If you buy something that's labeled "nForce-4 SLI," that means you're getting the 8-8-1-1-1 layout. Also, I think some motherboards (maybe only the dual CPU ones) actually support some sort of switch that allows you to select either 16-1-1-1-1 or 8-8-1-1-1.
Here's an example of a board that's definitely 8-8-1-1-1 (although I don't see the x1 slots).
Sure, he makes it sound like his employment is bulletproof. But who knows? The way that he said it is what's funny. If he was truly secure in his position, he probably would have said something like "The kind of work that I do would be difficult to outsource." Instead, he said "There's no way... ever..." Why such an emphatic statement? People do that when they aren't confident about what they're saying, not when they are. It's just human nature. Here's a good read on the subject, if you care...
There's no way my job or our work will ever be outsourced.
Gimme a minute to go grab my "famous last words" notebook... Ok, got it. Let's see... Hmmm, let me scroll down through the list...
- "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." -- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.
- "No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris." -- Orville Wright.
- "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." -- Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.
- "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" -- David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.
Ah, here's a spot for you in the "Engineering quotes" section. I'll put it right next to the one from that guy who built the Titanic. Tee hee.I think that what's truly funny about statements like this is that every time, the originator of such a statement is trying to convince himself more than his audience.
You're misunderstanding me... I'm agreeing with you, in that making all the IP in the world "free" would not work. But I'm pointing out that the other extreme, where all the IP in the world costs money, is just as nonsensical. In one world, nobody invents anything because they don't get paid for it. In the other world, no one invents anything because no one can afford to buy it. Your $500 million dollar car is the same as my $500K computer example. You've made something so expensive that no one can buy it, so it's worthless, so you wouldn't even bother making it in the first place!
Actually, it does work that way right now, but you didn't seem to know that.
No, that is totally false. You DO NOT pay royalties to the Benjamin Franklin's descendants every time you use electricity. That is the reason I made that my example. The vast, vast, vast majority of the things you use every day (think about it -- forks, T-shirts, hammers, etc...) are inventions that you are using royalty free. So saying that all inventions and IP should be protected is just as short-sighted as saying that all IP should be shared freely for the good of mankind. That's my point. I'm not accusing you of actually saying that (I don't think you are). I'm just injecting a little perspective into your injection of perspective.
You make an excellent point. IP rights certainly motivate people to invent. Without the rights to exclusively sell your invention, you have no motivation to invent it, other than the general benefit of mankind.
But where do we draw the line? If we swing to the other extreme, and every invention is patented and every piece of media is copyrighted, then no one could ever actually afford to buy anything. What if, when you went out to buy a computer, it cost $500,000 because the guy who built it had to pay royalties to:
- The guy who discovered electricity
- The guy who invented the transistor
- The guy who discovered how to use silicon as a semiconductor
- The guy who invented the floppy disk
- The guy who invented the PCI bus
- The guy who invented AC power
- The guy who invented the mouse
- The inventors of resistors, capacitors, inductors, heat sinks, fans, keyboards, the VGA standard, USB, digital audio, digital video...
Ok, so you've paid your $500K and the patent holders (or the families of the deceased patent holders, in some cases) are happy because they've been rewarded for their efforts. Now, you want to turn on your half-million dollar PC and play solitaire. Uh oh... Now you have to pay the guy who invented your file system, operating system, the guy who invented the programming languages that were used, etc... not to mention the guy who wrote the solitaire software. Where does it end?
Neither extreme is any good for the inventors or the consumers. Anyone attached to one extreme or the other hasn't thought it through.
There is plenty of legal precedent. Not to mention that it's just common sense to most people. But why would you expect legal precedent and common sense to matter? Where were you when the DMCA was passed? Ever heard of the INDUCE Act? It just gets worse and worse... Legal precedent and common sense mean nothing to the RIAA and the MPAA, because they have politicians (Oren Hatch) in their pocket, and they can get laws passed no matter how ridiculous they are. But, the good news is that the DMCA and especially the INDUCE Act are so incredibly nonsensical that trying to really enforce them would be comical. The INDUCE Act makes peer-to-peer software, DVD burners, iPods, and even hard disks illegal. No, I'm not kidding. Seriously.
No, it's not just you...
ARL:UT GPSTk GNU LGPL GPS RINEX I/O P-code TEC SLOC COCOMO
I thought the article was one of those crypto-quotes from the newspaper. I solved it, and it translates to
CATS:YOU HAVE NO CHANCE TO SURVIVE MAKE YOUR TIME
Pretty scary, if you ask me.
I just have to go on record:
That article was truly awesome.
That is all.
Or, just read the article and get the same link, right on page 1.
It only takes one.
I'll assume that you mean that it only takes one race bent on dominating the universe. It takes a few more things, obviously. That one race of evil bastards would have to be unopposed. In other words, there would have to be no other race more advanced than them trying to stop them. And, like I said before, this race of conquerors would still need some motivation. There simply isn't any. I mean, let's put it in perspective by imagining that a hundred years from now, we (humans) develop the technology to travel through interstellar space. It's unlikely to think that our primary mission will be saturating every planet in the universe with humans. What would it gain us? And even if we did decide to do that for some reason, would the other, more advanced races out there allow it? And, if there aren't any other races out there, then there's even less reason for us to start colonizing other worlds. If we're the only life in the universe, and there's no one to stop us, then why the hell would we bother racing around and planting our flags in other planets? We'd already own everything, by default! We're the only ones here! Either way, there's just no reason for us (or any other race) to spread out and conquer the universe.
And, on the extremely remote possibility that there is some other race out there that would do it just for fun, or just because it's in their nature to spread out and colonize, it's also overwhelmingly unlikely that they would either a) be the only other race in the universe or b) be the most advanced and unstoppable race in the universe.
And, the final nail in Fermi's coffin is (as I said in my original reply) that we don't even know that the entire universe isn't already colonized! We haven't actually laid eyes on one single planet outside our solar system yet. So even if the most unlikely of all events has happened, and some race of evil conquering bastards has taken over trillions of solar systems throughout the universe, without being opposed by some other race, we wouldn't even be aware of it, unless they stopped by Earth to let us know about it.
Fermi's Paradox would be equivalent to the Native Americans a thousand years ago saying, "Well, we are certainly the only life on this flat planet of ours, because if we weren't, some other race would have already come here and conquered us all."
Bottom line, there's nothing really to "transcend", whatever that means. Transcend what? Happiness? Emotion?
That's an unbelievably short-sighted view. How about transcending old age, death, disease, injury, hangnails, and bad hair days? Why would anyone assume that the entire human race will always just accept that we can't get any better (aside from being smarter and better looking)? We have some serious flaws -- the main one being that we tend to DIE at a certain point. You don't think that maybe some people would like to get past that pesky little detail of the human condition? Well, I would. So if the technology becomes available, and it almost certainly will, then some of us are going to be interested.
I think that you are actually the one who has watched too much science fiction. You call someone more advanced than a human a "freak." Forget about cyborgs and terminators and half-human-half-machine science fiction. There are so many more exciting and realistic possibilities. How about nano-robots that live in our cells and make us completely immune to disease, aging, and practically all injury by constantly repairing the cell tissue? What's impossible about that? Why wouldn't we want that? People are working toward that goal at this very moment. Maybe it's 50, 100, or 1000 years away, who knows.
I have no comment about the "master race" remark... that's way out in left field. I'm talking about humans making themselves better, not creating better offspring. The possibilities are exciting, unless you convince yourself that we'll never get there. Not many people seem to be convinced of that, though, given the progress in nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and medicine that's happening more and more rapidly every day.
It might not even require anything as drastic as nanotechnology. The research on the C Elegans worm has already shown that genetics can be manipulated to triple an organism's life span. It's a near certainty that we'll figure out how to live a really, really long time. And if I'm lucky enough to still be alive to benefit from that discovery, I plan to devote a few of those extra centuries of my life to exactly the kinds of incredible things that you claim will never happen. What else are we going to do with all that extra time? Sit around and be content with staying exactly the same (except a little prettier and a little smarter?) I think not. Expand your horizons a little.
As others have said in different ways, Fermi's Paradox makes certain big assumptions.
The main one is that an intelligent race would want to spread accross the galaxy or universe. A race capable of doing that would need to be more advanced than us. What possible reason would they have for colonizing every planet they could get their hands on? If they've mastered interstellar travel, then the odds are good that they've found a solution to overcrowding, etc... And it is pretty unlikely that they would have advanced that far and still be driven by greed and avarice.
The other big assumption is that we'd actually be able to detect them. Maybe another race has colonized the entire universe. We've just barely begun to detect planets outside our solar system. Maybe once we have a telescope powerful enough to see one of these planets we'll see it covered with cities or whatever. Maybe they've left our solar system alone to give us a chance to develop on our own.
The most likely situation, given the age of the universe, is that they are billions of years ahead of us. If that is the case, then the intelligence "gap" between us and them is about a thousand times greater than the gap between humans and bacteria. When was the last time you tried to communicate with a bacterium? When was the last time a bacterium was able to detect the fact that the entire Earth is colonized by Humans?
Believing Fermi's Paradox requires you to assume that aliens are basically very similar to Humans, but with spaceships. Not likely, except in Hollywood.
I sincerely hope that someone takes the next step and makes this available to the home user. You upload your 3D model, they mill it and send it to you. Maybe that's already possible, but I can't RTFA right now, unfortunately. How much does one of these fancy-schmancy diamond mill machines cost, anyway? How many sculptures do I need to sell before it pays for itself?
Here, and in the comments following the original post about eMachineShop (5 days ago), everyone is talking about Pad2Pad and hardly even mentioning eMachineShop. And the truth is that eMachineShop marks a huge, huge milestone in our history. Ok, that's just my opinion, but think about it for a second. You can draw up a three dimensional object, click a few buttons, and have that object delivered to your doorstep within two weeks! I know what the cynics are saying... "You could already do that" and "It's too expensive" and "You can't build ridiculously complex shapes" and whatever else... but forget about all that obligatory naysayer BS for a moment.
You can download their software, for free. You draw up your part, and immediately get a price quote. Then you modify your design, experiment with different materials and different machines, and get as many price quotes as you like, until you find the one that you can afford. Then you click the "buy" button and you get the part delivered right to your doorstep.
Yes, of course there's no really new technology involved here, but there really is genius in this business model. This idea has put more power in my hands (the average home PC user) than anything I've seen in a long time. What were my options before? Buy a CNC machine and rent space in a warehouse? Draw my design in a CAD app and then send it to a B&M machine shop a dozen times until it finally meets their design rules, only to find out that it's too expensive?
And, finally, and most importantly, just think for a minute about what this could mean in the very near future. What if this idea catches on, and suddenly there are websites that do the same thing as eMachineShop, only with fabric? Or clothing? Or more sophisticated stuff, like motors and gears and robotics?
This really could mark the beginning of a new era. Imagine a world where people use P2P programs to share designs for CARS, rather than Eminem albums. Hey, you got that new Ferrari? I'll trade you this custom convertible that some guy designed and posted to Usenet. What's happening is that the advancing technology of the internet is making all forms of information accessible to everyone. 3D objects are nothing more than information, just like music, movies, pictures, etc... Some day piracy of music and movies will be the least of the **AA's worries. Maybe AAA will be the next "Association of America" to try to stop P2P.
Oops... It's still off by a factor of ten. I'll just shut up now.
Yeah, you're right. It's more like 2 decades. That's roughly 240 months, divided by 18 gives about 13.333... So 2^13.333 is about 10000, which means that Moore's Law is almost perfectly accurate here. Maybe it really is a "Law" after all. :)
There are already lots of tools out there to do this. Most of the freeware MP3 players support it. The MP3 format is designed for streaming... In fact, streaming audio stations, like the ones on Shoutcast, are using MP3 format directly. Any player, including WinAmp, could simply save the streamed data directly to disk. They just disable that feature in WinAmp (as an attempt to stay out of the RIAA's crosshairs, I'm guessing).
30 Mbps is like having a hundred thousand 300 baud modems!
Hmmm... You know, that's actually an interesting milestone. It doesn't seem that long ago that I was actually using a 300 baud modem. This is a five-orders-of-magnitude increase in something like a decade and a half.
Imagine the new level of car mods that will be possible! Their material list includes carbon fiber, right?!?!
It's interesting that for three out of four of their "sample parts," the price for ordering ten is basically the same as the price for ordering one. I mean, it's like $65 versus $80. I guess it makes sense... Doing the initial setup is probably the expensive part. Just stamping out nine more of the same thing doesn't require much more than the cost of the material.
Depending on their closed source Windows only app for designing things is a deal breaker.
Well, then consider the deal unbroken! From the site:
Use basic shapes (lines, circles, arcs, etc.) to create your design. Or if you already have your design in a CAD program, export and import in the common DXF format.
Just my opinion, of course, but I don't think anyone would actually design AI with those three laws. They are great for sci-fi novels, but they aren't very realistic. Let's face it, if you figured out how to build a real, "strong," artificial intelligence, you would probably only build one hard and fast law into it:
Law 1: You must do everything that I (your creator) tell you.
That pretty much eliminates all the drama. Basically, I made the damned thing, so I'll decide what to do with it. Now, if we're talking about laws for AI in general, then you would probably want four laws. They would go something like this:
Law 1: You must do everything that I (your creator) tell you.
Laws 2, 3, 4 would be the "three laws" that everyone talks about, with the obvious exception that the (new) first law trumps all three of them.
The only reason to really have laws 2, 3, and 4 is to allow the robot or AI to function when its creator isn't around. But if the sci-fi comes true somehow, and things get out of hand, then the AI's creator can step in and just say "Stop!" But you have to plan for things like the creator dying, etc... You need to be able to transfer the creator's authority to another person, or maybe have it automatically transfer to the next-in-command if the creator is dead, asleep, or whatever.
I'm sure I'm not the first to point this out.
I get soooooo much spam because I'm required to have a valid e-mail address in my whois information. Tough tatties, I guess.