There are also open source compilers for basic stamps, SX chips, ARM, MSP430, and a whackload of other hardware.
What I'm talking about is an actual development board, with a uC and test-leads that you can use to attach it to the real world.
I prefer not to have to try hand convert surface mount 48 pin LQFP packages to dip format. I prefer to concentrate on developing devices, not the uC programmer itself...
I think that having the compilers freely available is great, but it's only a portion of the way.
I wonder if he's also waiting for aliens hiding behind a comet to come and rescue his business from all the 'open source bandits' who want to rob real developers everywhere of their work.
Has he not yet realized that open source doesn't mean that developers can't be paid. Does he not realize that there is a commercially viable business model for open source and free software? Doesn't he know that open source doesn't mean free?
Darl, wake up: you are crusading against something that will only end up helping people!
I bet that the '12 million developers worldwide' would prefer to see SCO invest their litigation costs in actual software development.
That kind of money (multibillion dollar lawsuit ) could produce a valuable open source software package. heh. With the right business model, they might even be able to turn a profit without suing the pants off everyone they can point a stick at. more heh.
If "the new gold is IP," why is it costing SCO so much to have enforced? It's alchemy they are after, not mining. Unfortunately for them, lead doesn't become gold without great expense.
I realize you are kidding... here is what Raman really is... (give or take a few details;p)
Spectroscopy: study of quantities of light at various wavelengths (or frequencies). Useful because matter interacts with light, so by measuring light passing through unknown matter, you figure out what its passing through.
Raman spectroscopy, is a branch where one looks at the wavelength shift occurring as light passes through a sample. A bit like doppler radar involves a shift of frequency (although it's not a shift due to the movement of molecues, but rather due to energy differences in orbitals as they move/distort).
The cool thing about Raman is that you just need a single wavelength of excitation, meaning you can build a spectrometer with a single laser diode. Then you filter off the laser line, and presto, the only light left will be the spectrum of interest.
Caveats: low intensity, frequency shift is very small, you still need a monochromator. Advantages: you get information that isn't available in standard IR & UV-vis spectra, the spectra are excitation freuency independant (not entirely true), by taking advantage of resonances it's possible to get REALLY intense spectra (resonance Raman and SERS).
I wonder what the optical properties are, and what the maximum size of these is?
Re:We control the horizontal, we control the verti
on
Breaking Google's DRM
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· Score: 1
What if the spyware was built into the bios? You'd need to be able to inspect & reprogram the code running on the uC (or uP).
I guess it may seem a bit farfetched (likely not), but what if the spyware was vendor-installed in hardware drivers. Nobody I know has ever read through the code running their portable electronics, it'd be illegal and very costly to get the dev tools.
I agree, 500$ dev kits are cheap for a medium-to-large business.
I also wonder whether development will continue to be driven by larger businesses, or more like science and technology, be more geared towards innovation by small companies being incorporated into larger companies (so the large companies avoid risk in R&D).
I'd guess that as time passes, the dev kit costs will become more significant, as amateurs have access to dev tools which can compete with those of larger R&D labs.
Perhaps uC product adoption by masses of amateurs will drive a significant portion of the market.
sorry, html swallowed the parallax costs: less than 300$ (watch those angle brackets folks!)
Dev kit costs?? That's what I find critical.
on
32-bit Processors, Cheap
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· Score: 5, Informative
Having an inexpensive 32 bit uC is great. How much are the development kits? 500$?
The basic stamps are great. For an 8-bit 10kHz platform that runs PBASIC.
The SX & PIC chips are great for 8-bit systems that run at a few MHz (sx up to 50 MHz), that are programmed in assembly.
The TI MSP430 is a great 16-bit platform that runs at 8MHz, programmed in C/C++ (in a few weeks they will probably unveil a 25MHz version). They also include lots of things that I don't like to have to add-on myself. (12-bit A/D & D/A, op-amps, HW uarts/I2C, and so on)
There would definitely be a market for these things, but I'd like to see if they can match development costs for small developers. It seems to me that a key is opening development to the masses. That's what impresses me about the few I listed above. Dev kits from TI are 100$, and from Parallax are
I use uC's for embedding scientific devices onto smaller/cheaper/faster chips. That's great. Now for me to be able try it, and learn to use it, I can't go buy an expensive dev kit. Regardless of the end cost of the chip, I prefer to pay 30-50$ for a board with a chip, that I put in a box and use, than a uC with smt leads that I can't get to work in place without a few hundred to thousand dollars of dev costs.
Re:We control the horizontal, we control the verti
on
Breaking Google's DRM
·
· Score: 1
With low power devices, there is the serious prospect of building sealed package electronics that would last longer than the application lifetime without ever introducing an additional power charge.
If you think I'm exaggerating, take a look at the http://www.ti.com/msp430/MSP430 low power microcontroller from TI. I'm developing products with it today (dev. kit is sitting on my desk). Heck, I'm going to a developer conference that TI is giving on it next month in Dallas. The world is changing in the direction mentioned.
Example applications are already listed such as a smoke detector/intrusion detection system and power meter that have completely sealed packages (read never change batteries) that will function for 10 years.
Hence the idea of having a product you can't turn off is a serious one.
Welcome to a world of things happening around you without your knowledge or consent. I'd estimate that products that have the potential to to terrible things will be around us all in about 2 years.
By terrible things I mean:
Track the user's position without any indication.
Eavesdrop & surveil the customer or any persons near the customer.
Not really be off when they are supposed to be.
Have multiple purposes that are not expected by the consumer.
Imagine a wrist watch that sends an approximate position out via wireless signals every few minutes or hours, with a unique tracking number. Or that transmits voice clips (which it has already transcribed via embedded software). Or constantly taking biomedical measurements, and reporting them to centralized databases (you medical insurer keeps track of any heart arrythmia, or strenuous activity).
These things might be given away for free, and even if you choose to avoid them, your neighbour may not, exposing you to considerable side effects. Keep in mind, that the code on these things is pretty much always closed source, so you never know what will be running on them.
Then again the power of positive effects is very significant. Depending on the use, the world could change in significantly different ways.
I just began to read the project code myself, but it seems that they have pretty clearly laid out formatting issues and other points for keeping the project well organized and cleanly coded. I'd guess that anyone who would want to review code to check for formatting would be welcome.
Besides that, I'm not too sure. I used to be really keen on the idea of everything being coded in C++. Then I learned more about *NIX (read Art of Unix Programming, Eric S. Raymond), and now I'm more in favor of standard C. After reading a bit of the actual DIRAC code, this project seems like it'll take a while to get comfortable with (due to C++ notation that makes things slightly less legible), but quite interesting. Does anyone else find that C++'s 'good' features are designed in such a way that although they are really useful, are also very hard to read?
Why not contact the BBC DIRAC team, and ask them the same questions? I think they will appreciate the response.
Since results must be biased in some way by the number of sources reporting a story, and the majority of our sources are (arguably) biased, won't the results come out skewed anyways. Regardless of Google's impartiality, I wonder how much of a chance smaller and important stories really have of making it to the surface? A kitten stuck in a tree covered by several newspapers might be able to creep pretty high, but a massacre in some remote country may rank pretty low.
Then again, Google is pure genius, so let's all not worry.;)
Seems to me that what's new here is that t-rex was feathery. It's already pretty well accepted that some dinosaurs had feathers, and that birds are descended from some dino family branch.
It is still funny to picture a bunch of these things. I mean, talk about crossing images... pack of bloodthirsty, dangerous t-rex... Now add on the feathers...
I found the comment about making the NES function interesting.
I remember my old NES required a combination of blowing into the machine, pushing up/down on the cartridge, hitting/kicking the console and praying to get most games to load.
In fact, I think those were my formative days for more modern PC troubleshooting.;)
If people who resell the machines find a need to replace the contacts inside with *functional* contacts, I wonder why Nintendo didn't do it in the first place?
At least Microsoft gets the hardware right in the xbox (am I right about that? the HW is decent, right?).;)
Good luck to the winner... I don't know how anyone could turn a profit from *that much* junk. I could easily imagine a few old consoles being worth significant coin, but dozens or hundreds? Flood the market? Just to keep a few dozen hundred pound boxes lying around costs a lot.
The sellers previous auctions are interesting: the vast majority are listed as 'private'. Seems strange that so much positive feedback would be based on 'unconfirmable' sales. I'd think twice before handing over tens of thousands of dollars. Also, just verifying the contents of the 21 boxes would take hours... it'd be hard to catch if it was a scam.
The quote you have chosen seems to indicate that their choice has nothing to do with DRM, but rather browser support.
It comes down to whether or not they need to supply multiple clip formats due to platform dependant licensing issues.
They seem to be having trouble with using formats that are platform dependant and programs that aren't freely distributable. They are having to provide technical support for closed-source programs.
I'd think that the argument someone made in an early post about the BBC not being a software development company applies. It only makes sense for the BBC to be involved in media distribution development to a very limited extent. Hiring a single person (or a few people) to coordinate the CODEC development makes sense. Hiring a full blown programming team wouldn't. They will need a continual progression of work over a long-term. They will also not be licensing the technology or getting a revenue for it. So why would they hire anybody to develop it?
I would be surprised to find any BBC worker who was laid off from a BBC 'software CODEC programming job' because of OS development. If anything, it will boost the productivity of employees working on the CODEC, by allowing them to develop the CODEC more quickly and robustly. This is a matter of asking the community to help develop a tool that it would like to use, without footing the full bill.
Besides that, why shouldn't I be allowed to give my own time? I can volunteer in a hospital, a shelter or as a tutor, why shouldn't I be able to volunteer my high-tech skills for a cause I believe to be worthwhile. Isn't it worthwhile to reduce the cost of disseminating the 'free press'?
"BEGIN TROLL FILTER" The US & britain are bombing other countries in the hopes of bringing them freedom. Why not support a better dissemination of information to them, to help distribute a picture of what is going on in the rest of the world. Change can be voluntary instead. "END TROLL FILTER"
Should a large portion of the BBC IT staff be paid to develop CODECs? I believe not, it's not the BBC's task to develop distribution media. However, you are raising a completely extraneous point, since I'm in no way replacing in-house IT staff. But if I felt that I could volunteer time for replacing IT staff, why should I feel bad about it?
I'm not quite sure what upsets you about this whole issue, but please feel free to explain to me how developing a useful, novel open-source CODEC puts IT staff out of work.
Project has a financial base and centralized development point.
Project already has large exposure.
To those who don't think it worthwhile: they aren't forcing you to join in, and they aren't excluding you from the eventual benefits.
The wavelet technology they are using is IMHO a very good idea. I'd like to see Neural Network based compression operating to further compress the data stream (I'm not sure if it would be able to compress much more after the wavelet algorithm has already compressed the stream).
At the very least, by reading the code, lots of open source developers will be exposed to wavelet compression algorithms, and learn a bit about video representation. Doesn't seem like a losing prospect for anyone.
However, this would let people in an area know that they should make sure to be prepared. IE. if you live on a red spot on the map, you will probably be hit by a strong earthquake in the near future. Since you know this, it is worthwhile reinforcing buildings and making any new buildings for higher stress(?) ratings.
Just because we can't say that on October 10th there will be an earthquake, doesn't mean that this isn't a powerful tool. I'd be really happy to have a few years notice that my house has a good chance of getting shaken to the ground in the next 10 years. I'd certainly renovate my house, building in better protection. Plus, the people elsewhere know that in the near future they have less to worry about.
Don't forget this also helps state emergency response services to localize themselves to be out of danger during a strong quake, but close enough to respond quickly.
Information is only useless if we don't use it wisely (as opposed to using information for a purpose it isn't really meant to help with).
Re:ARL at McGill develops similar robots.
on
Animal Robots
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· Score: 1
Oh, they are also partially funded by a group that includes Boston Dynamics (mentioned in the article).
ARL at McGill develops similar robots.
on
Animal Robots
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· Score: 2, Informative
The Ambulatory Robotics Lab at McGill develops several robots, including a series based on cockroaches. They work really well... I'm biased, my girlfriend is doing her masters about one (aqua).
I think they have been slashdotted once already... They've got video of the robots online.
But I also don't think that the american government functions as you describe it. It would seems more like an organization controlling the collective people of your country, rather than people as a collective acting.
At least once a day an article posted here underscores that, in that corporations are considered valied entities, and control the government through lobbying. Very little policy is decided by Red vs. Blue voting, such as for Bush/Gore. Ok, so it does make a difference when someone decides to take over another country. That doesn't mean that your laws reflect the wishes of the people living there.
I'd be willing to bet that most Brits are happy not to have people possessing firearms except in a very limited scope. I know most Canadians are happy with gun control (although not necessarily with the registry mess). We have more guns per person than the states, but we don't have the same philosophy.
Regardless of this offtopic discussion, unnecessary surveillance is a practice that has been well mastered by the US and British governments alike (Canada is probably not too far behind). Unfortunately, it seems that it inconveniences the average person more than it helps with actualy securing a state.
Any software can be copied. With some difficulty, someone, somewhere will rip it and burn it. That's life.
Why not try to use that to your advantage. Instead of trying to force people to support the development costs, realize that being a developer will mean you have people freeloading off you. At least you will get publicity from the software popularity. If the software is worth writing, it should either be novel/good enough for people to voluntarily pay for, or it may be justifiable in it's own right as something worth giving to the world.
If you want to have people pay for your code, embed it in hardware (like microcontrollers). It's cheap enough to build embedded devices, why code only for major platforms?
Anyone who uses serial numbers, registrations, encryption, or nasty underhanded attacks to try to force people to pay for software, is greatly misguided. Software is most often pirated by someone wanting to try a piece of software for a few days, or for a simple task. It is ridiculous to ask 30$ for a single-use software. It isn't ridiculous to ask a user to pay after a month of use. But because a serial number is needed for the first few (unrestricted) uses, the pirated serial has already been used, and the user need not think about giving the developer any reward. (besides, they have spent their time looking up a SN/ or cracking the program)
Software shouldn't cost money.
Problem solving, for specific/custom programming projects should cost money. Open source development should be rewarded by centralized funding pools.
Developers who try to keep their code secret, and who try to charge people money for it, shouldn't be surprised to find that it's a greedy approach that isn't worthwhile for society to protect.
Good luck to those who try anyways. I hope the developer mentioned in the article is charged with some kind of civil law suit for damages.
Slashdot Mirror
avr-gcc: That's a compiler.
There are also open source compilers for basic stamps, SX chips, ARM, MSP430, and a whackload of other hardware.
What I'm talking about is an actual development board, with a uC and test-leads that you can use to attach it to the real world.
I prefer not to have to try hand convert surface mount 48 pin LQFP packages to dip format. I prefer to concentrate on developing devices, not the uC programmer itself...
I think that having the compilers freely available is great, but it's only a portion of the way.
I wonder if he's also waiting for aliens hiding behind a comet to come and rescue his business from all the 'open source bandits' who want to rob real developers everywhere of their work.
Has he not yet realized that open source doesn't mean that developers can't be paid. Does he not realize that there is a commercially viable business model for open source and free software? Doesn't he know that open source doesn't mean free?
Darl, wake up: you are crusading against something that will only end up helping people!
I bet that the '12 million developers worldwide' would prefer to see SCO invest their litigation costs in actual software development.
That kind of money (multibillion dollar lawsuit ) could produce a valuable open source software package. heh. With the right business model, they might even be able to turn a profit without suing the pants off everyone they can point a stick at. more heh.
If "the new gold is IP," why is it costing SCO so much to have enforced? It's alchemy they are after, not mining. Unfortunately for them, lead doesn't become gold without great expense.
I realize you are kidding... here is what Raman really is... (give or take a few details ;p)
Spectroscopy: study of quantities of light at various wavelengths (or frequencies). Useful because matter interacts with light, so by measuring light passing through unknown matter, you figure out what its passing through.
Raman spectroscopy, is a branch where one looks at the wavelength shift occurring as light passes through a sample. A bit like doppler radar involves a shift of frequency (although it's not a shift due to the movement of molecues, but rather due to energy differences in orbitals as they move/distort).
The cool thing about Raman is that you just need a single wavelength of excitation, meaning you can build a spectrometer with a single laser diode. Then you filter off the laser line, and presto, the only light left will be the spectrum of interest.
Caveats: low intensity, frequency shift is very small, you still need a monochromator. Advantages: you get information that isn't available in standard IR & UV-vis spectra, the spectra are excitation freuency independant (not entirely true), by taking advantage of resonances it's possible to get REALLY intense spectra (resonance Raman and SERS).
Having a hard day at work...
This might be good for new machining tools?
I wonder what the optical properties are, and what the maximum size of these is?
What if the spyware was built into the bios? You'd need to be able to inspect & reprogram the code running on the uC (or uP).
I guess it may seem a bit farfetched (likely not), but what if the spyware was vendor-installed in hardware drivers. Nobody I know has ever read through the code running their portable electronics, it'd be illegal and very costly to get the dev tools.
I agree, 500$ dev kits are cheap for a medium-to-large business.
I also wonder whether development will continue to be driven by larger businesses, or more like science and technology, be more geared towards innovation by small companies being incorporated into larger companies (so the large companies avoid risk in R&D).
I'd guess that as time passes, the dev kit costs will become more significant, as amateurs have access to dev tools which can compete with those of larger R&D labs.
Perhaps uC product adoption by masses of amateurs will drive a significant portion of the market.
sorry, html swallowed the parallax costs: less than 300$ (watch those angle brackets folks!)
Having an inexpensive 32 bit uC is great. How much are the development kits? 500$?
The basic stamps are great. For an 8-bit 10kHz platform that runs PBASIC.
The SX & PIC chips are great for 8-bit systems that run at a few MHz (sx up to 50 MHz), that are programmed in assembly.
The TI MSP430 is a great 16-bit platform that runs at 8MHz, programmed in C/C++ (in a few weeks they will probably unveil a 25MHz version). They also include lots of things that I don't like to have to add-on myself. (12-bit A/D & D/A, op-amps, HW uarts/I2C, and so on)
There would definitely be a market for these things, but I'd like to see if they can match development costs for small developers. It seems to me that a key is opening development to the masses. That's what impresses me about the few I listed above. Dev kits from TI are 100$, and from Parallax are
I use uC's for embedding scientific devices onto smaller/cheaper/faster chips. That's great. Now for me to be able try it, and learn to use it, I can't go buy an expensive dev kit. Regardless of the end cost of the chip, I prefer to pay 30-50$ for a board with a chip, that I put in a box and use, than a uC with smt leads that I can't get to work in place without a few hundred to thousand dollars of dev costs.
With low power devices, there is the serious prospect of building sealed package electronics that would last longer than the application lifetime without ever introducing an additional power charge.
If you think I'm exaggerating, take a look at the http://www.ti.com/msp430/MSP430 low power microcontroller from TI. I'm developing products with it today (dev. kit is sitting on my desk). Heck, I'm going to a developer conference that TI is giving on it next month in Dallas. The world is changing in the direction mentioned.
Example applications are already listed such as a smoke detector/intrusion detection system and power meter that have completely sealed packages (read never change batteries) that will function for 10 years.
Hence the idea of having a product you can't turn off is a serious one.
Welcome to a world of things happening around you without your knowledge or consent. I'd estimate that products that have the potential to to terrible things will be around us all in about 2 years.
By terrible things I mean:
Imagine a wrist watch that sends an approximate position out via wireless signals every few minutes or hours, with a unique tracking number. Or that transmits voice clips (which it has already transcribed via embedded software). Or constantly taking biomedical measurements, and reporting them to centralized databases (you medical insurer keeps track of any heart arrythmia, or strenuous activity).
These things might be given away for free, and even if you choose to avoid them, your neighbour may not, exposing you to considerable side effects. Keep in mind, that the code on these things is pretty much always closed source, so you never know what will be running on them.
Then again the power of positive effects is very significant. Depending on the use, the world could change in significantly different ways.
I just began to read the project code myself, but it seems that they have pretty clearly laid out formatting issues and other points for keeping the project well organized and cleanly coded. I'd guess that anyone who would want to review code to check for formatting would be welcome.
Besides that, I'm not too sure. I used to be really keen on the idea of everything being coded in C++. Then I learned more about *NIX (read Art of Unix Programming, Eric S. Raymond), and now I'm more in favor of standard C. After reading a bit of the actual DIRAC code, this project seems like it'll take a while to get comfortable with (due to C++ notation that makes things slightly less legible), but quite interesting. Does anyone else find that C++'s 'good' features are designed in such a way that although they are really useful, are also very hard to read?
Why not contact the BBC DIRAC team, and ask them the same questions? I think they will appreciate the response.
I'm not sure how impartial google news really is.
Since results must be biased in some way by the number of sources reporting a story, and the majority of our sources are (arguably) biased, won't the results come out skewed anyways. Regardless of Google's impartiality, I wonder how much of a chance smaller and important stories really have of making it to the surface? A kitten stuck in a tree covered by several newspapers might be able to creep pretty high, but a massacre in some remote country may rank pretty low.
Then again, Google is pure genius, so let's all not worry. ;)
This is a good thing.
I just wonder how much scatter there is in the returned results.
Seems to me that what's new here is that t-rex was feathery. It's already pretty well accepted that some dinosaurs had feathers, and that birds are descended from some dino family branch.
It is still funny to picture a bunch of these things. I mean, talk about crossing images... pack of bloodthirsty, dangerous t-rex... Now add on the feathers...
and yes, t-rex probably were more solitary...
I found the comment about making the NES function interesting.
I remember my old NES required a combination of blowing into the machine, pushing up/down on the cartridge, hitting/kicking the console and praying to get most games to load.
In fact, I think those were my formative days for more modern PC troubleshooting. ;)
If people who resell the machines find a need to replace the contacts inside with *functional* contacts, I wonder why Nintendo didn't do it in the first place?
At least Microsoft gets the hardware right in the xbox (am I right about that? the HW is decent, right?). ;)
Good luck to the winner... I don't know how anyone could turn a profit from *that much* junk. I could easily imagine a few old consoles being worth significant coin, but dozens or hundreds? Flood the market? Just to keep a few dozen hundred pound boxes lying around costs a lot.
The sellers previous auctions are interesting: the vast majority are listed as 'private'. Seems strange that so much positive feedback would be based on 'unconfirmable' sales. I'd think twice before handing over tens of thousands of dollars. Also, just verifying the contents of the 21 boxes would take hours... it'd be hard to catch if it was a scam.
The quote you have chosen seems to indicate that their choice has nothing to do with DRM, but rather browser support.
It comes down to whether or not they need to supply multiple clip formats due to platform dependant licensing issues.
They seem to be having trouble with using formats that are platform dependant and programs that aren't freely distributable. They are having to provide technical support for closed-source programs.
I'd think that the argument someone made in an early post about the BBC not being a software development company applies. It only makes sense for the BBC to be involved in media distribution development to a very limited extent. Hiring a single person (or a few people) to coordinate the CODEC development makes sense. Hiring a full blown programming team wouldn't. They will need a continual progression of work over a long-term. They will also not be licensing the technology or getting a revenue for it. So why would they hire anybody to develop it?
I would be surprised to find any BBC worker who was laid off from a BBC 'software CODEC programming job' because of OS development. If anything, it will boost the productivity of employees working on the CODEC, by allowing them to develop the CODEC more quickly and robustly. This is a matter of asking the community to help develop a tool that it would like to use, without footing the full bill.
Besides that, why shouldn't I be allowed to give my own time? I can volunteer in a hospital, a shelter or as a tutor, why shouldn't I be able to volunteer my high-tech skills for a cause I believe to be worthwhile. Isn't it worthwhile to reduce the cost of disseminating the 'free press'?
"BEGIN TROLL FILTER" The US & britain are bombing other countries in the hopes of bringing them freedom. Why not support a better dissemination of information to them, to help distribute a picture of what is going on in the rest of the world. Change can be voluntary instead. "END TROLL FILTER"
Should a large portion of the BBC IT staff be paid to develop CODECs? I believe not, it's not the BBC's task to develop distribution media. However, you are raising a completely extraneous point, since I'm in no way replacing in-house IT staff. But if I felt that I could volunteer time for replacing IT staff, why should I feel bad about it?
I'm not quite sure what upsets you about this whole issue, but please feel free to explain to me how developing a useful, novel open-source CODEC puts IT staff out of work.
I'm going to work on this if I have free time.
It seems interesting to me for several reasons:
To those who don't think it worthwhile: they aren't forcing you to join in, and they aren't excluding you from the eventual benefits.
The wavelet technology they are using is IMHO a very good idea. I'd like to see Neural Network based compression operating to further compress the data stream (I'm not sure if it would be able to compress much more after the wavelet algorithm has already compressed the stream).
At the very least, by reading the code, lots of open source developers will be exposed to wavelet compression algorithms, and learn a bit about video representation. Doesn't seem like a losing prospect for anyone.
However, this would let people in an area know that they should make sure to be prepared. IE. if you live on a red spot on the map, you will probably be hit by a strong earthquake in the near future. Since you know this, it is worthwhile reinforcing buildings and making any new buildings for higher stress(?) ratings.
Just because we can't say that on October 10th there will be an earthquake, doesn't mean that this isn't a powerful tool. I'd be really happy to have a few years notice that my house has a good chance of getting shaken to the ground in the next 10 years. I'd certainly renovate my house, building in better protection. Plus, the people elsewhere know that in the near future they have less to worry about.
Don't forget this also helps state emergency response services to localize themselves to be out of danger during a strong quake, but close enough to respond quickly.
Information is only useless if we don't use it wisely (as opposed to using information for a purpose it isn't really meant to help with).
That's my girlfriends lab, I posted that yesterday!
Why did I get a +2 comment rating, and have someone else get a full frickin' article post? Argh. (here's me being disgruntled)
By the way, they have already been slashdotted in the past http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/1 2/0156220&tid=126&tid=14, and you didn't mention that it's built at McGill. You could also have included the McGill ARL website link http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~arlweb/Welcome.html. They love getting slashdotted ;) [not quite true]. Poor Danny (the sysadmin).
Read my comment from yesterday! http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=122038&cid=102 66261
Oh, they are also partially funded by a group that includes Boston Dynamics (mentioned in the article).
The Ambulatory Robotics Lab at McGill develops several robots, including a series based on cockroaches. They work really well... I'm biased, my girlfriend is doing her masters about one (aqua).
I think they have been slashdotted once already... They've got video of the robots online.
If interested, try: http://www.cim.mcgill.ca/~arlweb/Welcome.html
IMHO, these are damned cool!
Totally the right way to look at it (IMHO).
I think a lot of people (including myself) often mistake the idealism for arrogance (in general when dealing with Americans).
I have nothing against americans.
But I also don't think that the american government functions as you describe it. It would seems more like an organization controlling the collective people of your country, rather than people as a collective acting.
At least once a day an article posted here underscores that, in that corporations are considered valied entities, and control the government through lobbying. Very little policy is decided by Red vs. Blue voting, such as for Bush/Gore. Ok, so it does make a difference when someone decides to take over another country. That doesn't mean that your laws reflect the wishes of the people living there.
I'd be willing to bet that most Brits are happy not to have people possessing firearms except in a very limited scope. I know most Canadians are happy with gun control (although not necessarily with the registry mess). We have more guns per person than the states, but we don't have the same philosophy.
Regardless of this offtopic discussion, unnecessary surveillance is a practice that has been well mastered by the US and British governments alike (Canada is probably not too far behind). Unfortunately, it seems that it inconveniences the average person more than it helps with actualy securing a state.
Any software can be copied. With some difficulty, someone, somewhere will rip it and burn it. That's life.
Why not try to use that to your advantage. Instead of trying to force people to support the development costs, realize that being a developer will mean you have people freeloading off you. At least you will get publicity from the software popularity. If the software is worth writing, it should either be novel/good enough for people to voluntarily pay for, or it may be justifiable in it's own right as something worth giving to the world.
If you want to have people pay for your code, embed it in hardware (like microcontrollers). It's cheap enough to build embedded devices, why code only for major platforms?
Anyone who uses serial numbers, registrations, encryption, or nasty underhanded attacks to try to force people to pay for software, is greatly misguided. Software is most often pirated by someone wanting to try a piece of software for a few days, or for a simple task. It is ridiculous to ask 30$ for a single-use software. It isn't ridiculous to ask a user to pay after a month of use. But because a serial number is needed for the first few (unrestricted) uses, the pirated serial has already been used, and the user need not think about giving the developer any reward. (besides, they have spent their time looking up a SN/ or cracking the program)
Software shouldn't cost money.
Problem solving, for specific/custom programming projects should cost money. Open source development should be rewarded by centralized funding pools.
Developers who try to keep their code secret, and who try to charge people money for it, shouldn't be surprised to find that it's a greedy approach that isn't worthwhile for society to protect.
Good luck to those who try anyways. I hope the developer mentioned in the article is charged with some kind of civil law suit for damages.