My point is that people should not expect making money if they mainly give away what they produce.
"Expect" - gotcha.
Hell, even selling the stuff is a dodgy proposition,
you shouldn't expect to make money even from giving it away. Not that I begrudge anyone who manages the trick...
If
this is
on the level then isn't Office's use of XML kind of pointless? I mean
where's the point of loudly adopting an interoperability standard like
XML if you then go and encrypt the result so no one else can read it>
I mean it's not your doing I know - but loudly trumpeting XML compliance
and arranging for it to be no bloody good to anyone would be just the
sort of trick your employer is famous for,
It't not that Yahoo! are behaving in a manner that is petty, short-sighted and ultimately self defeating.
No, what it is, is that they are exercising their sacred prerogative to behave in a petty, short-sighted and self-defeating manner. So that's all right. I will admit you had me worried for a moment there.
Or they might just inflict the same old shite 24/7 knowing they have a captive audience, with anything that you might actually want to see offered as pay-per-view.
And then what do you do? When all the channels are owned by the same guys and really do show the same crap over and over again? you can't even change the channel
Look - it's all about incentive. Without having to compete, the industry will be driven solely by bottom line profit magins. That will act to discourage filming new programs (costs money compare to repeats) and encourage more advertising (because that makes money).
So we're going to allow the govt, nay we ask the govt, to institute a new tax on computer stuff.
We trust them to keep it at the initial more or less fair levels
We trust them not to take a slice of money, as an admin fee.
We trust them to remunerate the artists in the first place.
We trust them not to privatise the agency overseeing the whole shebang and sell it off to the RIAA.
We extend this trust to them, I can only assume, based upon the high moral standards recently demonstrated by our elected officials. To say nothing of those that shall come after them, chanting as they come "Times have changed. The situation is different"
And we should request this? Maybe if we're extra nice we get them to kick us all in the balls as well.
I'm with you pal - the guy who porposed this one has been sneaking hits off of Darl McBride's pipe
Right. The trouble is that, decentralised as it is, P2P can't be controlled by any of the big corps.
It is an efficent, sensible, and (in cases like BitTorrentm) scalable distribution mechanism that requires little by way of resources or up front investment.
It lowers the cost of entry into a consolidated marketplace, and makes it possible for small outfits to compete. Naturally, the cartels would want to kill it even without the copyright issue. Efficient, decentalised distribution of resources? Where's the profit in that? Must be communism!
While patching bugs can be a nice touch to poor software, I don't know if I feel comfortable with ANYONE installing software on my hardware without asking permission first."
I'm sorry, I thought you understood. It's not your machine. It belongs to Little Willy in Redmond.
All you bought was the right to feed it electricity for him, If you're a good little boy he may let you look at some eye candy.
It is complex - and I don't pretend to understand all of it. However you look at it though, you're still raising 7 gigatonnes an average of 18,000 kicks out of the gravity well. So if we assume the upper reaches cancel out the lower ones then we can calculate the potential energy due to gravity.
There's useful web based app
here
which, using my previous assumptions, gives a total potential energy for the entire cable of 67 x 10^15 Joules
So, given 1 megaton is approx equal to 4x10^15. that still works out at about 16 megatonnes.
The difference this time is that the calculation is of the potential energy due ot gravity of the cable. If it comes down - this is how much energy will be released.
As for speed, remember that different parts of the cable all want to travel at the orbital velocity for their height - so the earth's rotation will tend to wrap the cable around the equator, accellerating all the time as you pointed out. It might take days - I have no idea how to calculate it. I doubt it would take more than a week all told.
But my degree is in software, not hardware. Any rocket scientist want to set us both straight?
Doesn't matter - the energy still has to go somewhere. It's not going to pretty if that happens.
For one thing - this is strong stuff we're talking about - incineration is garuanteed. If it breaks up that might sound like an imporovement - but the it's like being shot with a shotgun. It may be loaded with pellets, or it may be loaded with solid rounds. You may spead the impact a little, but its the kinetic energy that'll kill you - and you still get all of that.
Not scared yet? Let's put this in perspective.
according to its website the Golden Gate bridge weighs 380,800,000 kg and spans 1966m. That's probably comparable to the weight/length ratio for a space elevator. It uses hi-tech materials, but it has to support its own weight across its entire length, and its going to be long! According to
Nasa (google cache) the elevator is likely reach 36,000,000m. That's 18,311 times the length of the GGB
So taking the golden gate bridge as a guide, we can estimate the total weight of the cable at 18,311 x 380,800,000kg = 6.97 x 10^12. Seven gigatonnes - lighter than I expected.
How hard is it going to hit? Well, at least terminal velocity. I say "at least because the upper reaches will be going faster and have to be slowed by the atmosphere. Also the cable will be considerably denser than a human, so we can reckon it's terminal v as being rather more than a human's. Human terminal v is about
50m/s so let's go with that for the time being. We're being conservative..
Kinetic energy = 0,5 x mass x velocity x velocity
= 6.97294 x 10^12 x 50 x 50 / 2
= 8.716175 x 10^15 joules
And to put that in perspective, one
megaton
comes to about 4.184 x 10^15 Joules.
So if the cable came crashing down it'd release about 2 Megatons of kinetic energy - either as heat as it burnt up, or as shockwaves on impact.
Doesn't sound like much? Well, the
Hiroshima bomb is reckoned as being 20 killotonnes yeild. So 200 hundred hiroshima bombs going off in a ring around the equator in fairly rapid succession.
and it it hits faster than that... well that's a square term. 100m/s give you 4 time the energy or 800 hiroshima bombs. 200m/s (not unreasonable) gives 16 times - 3,200 x hiroshima.
Don't get me wrong - I'd love to see a space elevator. Just let's bear in mind that this is dangerous
How much does that much cable weigh? Imagine all that kinetic energy being returned to the planet surface. Imagine it coming down in a huge rolling compression wave that wraps around the equator again and again. Imagine the tsunami. It'd be a bad day do own property on the coast.
Think that magnitude of disruption might disrupt the weather patterns a little?
Yes, of course. However, just because MS are the bad guys in almost every scenarion, this does not mean that whoever opposes them are automatically on the side of the angels
Personally, I hope that Eolas are going to do right by the OS/Free Software community - but they've given no indication that they will - which, since the default practice is to sue everyone in sight, is a little ominous.
Don't get me wrong - I'm delighted to see the little fellow get justice after being wronged by the Evil Microsoft. I just don't assume that the enemy of my enemy is necessarily my friend.
They'd leave the big boys. the ones with the atack lawyers, alone. On the other hand, if you were a small company who'd have difficulty fighting the battle in court, they might accidentally misclassify your domain as a typo BullyCorp Ltd and wait to see if you noticed.
And if, god help you, you were a private citizen who happened to be saying something unpopular, well the cahnces of an administrative "error" would go way up. And if you didn't like it, you can go to court. Assuming you have the time and money that is.
The problem dosen't lie in them directing me to some cheesy gateway, the problem lies in them directing me to something that looks like what I wanted but isn't. Unless there's a "typo-corrected" flag on the returned DNS entry then I don't see how I can detect the change.
Even if such a flag exists, I'm not sure I trust them to honour it once a scheme like this starts generating revenue for them. They could morph their business from service provider to internet censors overnight. That'd be a popular movce in certain corporate and governmental circles.
More to the point they are stealing my mistakes. My mistakes have value to me.
Without the DNS returning an error for domain-not-found, I can't know if mis-typed. That is error correcting feedback (for me, not the computer) and I want it left on!
This is not an empty channel; this is not an unused resource, and what verisign are proposing is theft.
Not that that should come as a huge surpise to anyone, I suppose.
As long as we're being paranoid, did anyone else think that "I'm really scared. My tummy is all turny" =was just a bit too cutesy-pie for this day and age?
As a set up, this would be a work of genius. I mean something like this was going to happen sooner or later anyway, right? So - wy not get it out of the way early and under controlled circumstances.
Now, the very worst case has happened and lo! They paid up. Paid up without a gumble, but full of contrition and remorse to boot.
So when a genuine little girl gets targeted by
they can well hell - the last one paid up no bother - what's your problem?
As for the rest of us, what possible excuse can we have for not stumping up your protection money when hard pressed single mums pay up without a murmur?
The scenario is a little too paranoid even for my tastes. On the other hand, real life is turning into a bad SF parody day by day.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, even selling the stuff is a dodgy proposition, you shouldn't expect to make money even from giving it away. Not that I begrudge anyone who manages the trick...
That RedHat are a bad company?
That open source is not working?
That IBM are a bad company?
That there's no money in open source anything?
You seem to have a point you very much want to make, but I'm not at all clear on what it might be.
I mean it's not your doing I know - but loudly trumpeting XML compliance and arranging for it to be no bloody good to anyone would be just the sort of trick your employer is famous for,
It't not that Yahoo! are behaving in a manner that is petty, short-sighted and ultimately self defeating.
No, what it is, is that they are exercising their sacred prerogative to behave in a petty, short-sighted and self-defeating manner. So that's all right. I will admit you had me worried for a moment there.
Tcha. Kneejerk libertarians, I ask you...
I mean, how likely is that?
I really, really, really can't see how increasing the monopolisation of the media is going to cure anything.
More completition might just help though.
And then what do you do? When all the channels are owned by the same guys and really do show the same crap over and over again? you can't even change the channel
Look - it's all about incentive. Without having to compete, the industry will be driven solely by bottom line profit magins. That will act to discourage filming new programs (costs money compare to repeats) and encourage more advertising (because that makes money).
This is not exactly rocket science.
We trust them to keep it at the initial more or less fair levels
We trust them not to take a slice of money, as an admin fee.
We trust them to remunerate the artists in the first place.
We trust them not to privatise the agency overseeing the whole shebang and sell it off to the RIAA.
We extend this trust to them, I can only assume, based upon the high moral standards recently demonstrated by our elected officials. To say nothing of those that shall come after them, chanting as they come "Times have changed. The situation is different"
And we should request this? Maybe if we're extra nice we get them to kick us all in the balls as well.
I'm with you pal - the guy who porposed this one has been sneaking hits off of Darl McBride's pipe
Coming Soon: Fred's World of Widgets. Bur first a world from our sponsors: Joe's Widget Emporium...
I can see how that might be more than merely annoying.
Coming Soon! decent_family_values.org! Meanwhile, here's a sleazy porno toplist
How low do we trust these people not to stoop?
It is an efficent, sensible, and (in cases like BitTorrentm) scalable distribution mechanism that requires little by way of resources or up front investment.
It lowers the cost of entry into a consolidated marketplace, and makes it possible for small outfits to compete. Naturally, the cartels would want to kill it even without the copyright issue. Efficient, decentalised distribution of resources? Where's the profit in that? Must be communism!
All you bought was the right to feed it electricity for him, If you're a good little boy he may let you look at some eye candy.
Similarly, if it breaks from the orbital anchor point then thge whole thing comes down.
If it breaks somewhere along its length then we get a mixture of the two. This is the most likely scenario. How many petajoules do you want to wager?
There's useful web based app here which, using my previous assumptions, gives a total potential energy for the entire cable of 67 x 10^15 Joules
So, given 1 megaton is approx equal to 4x10^15. that still works out at about 16 megatonnes. The difference this time is that the calculation is of the potential energy due ot gravity of the cable. If it comes down - this is how much energy will be released.
As for speed, remember that different parts of the cable all want to travel at the orbital velocity for their height - so the earth's rotation will tend to wrap the cable around the equator, accellerating all the time as you pointed out. It might take days - I have no idea how to calculate it. I doubt it would take more than a week all told.
But my degree is in software, not hardware. Any rocket scientist want to set us both straight?
I meant "incineration is not garuanteed. Been a long week...
For one thing - this is strong stuff we're talking about - incineration is garuanteed. If it breaks up that might sound like an imporovement - but the it's like being shot with a shotgun. It may be loaded with pellets, or it may be loaded with solid rounds. You may spead the impact a little, but its the kinetic energy that'll kill you - and you still get all of that.
Not scared yet? Let's put this in perspective.
according to its website the Golden Gate bridge weighs 380,800,000 kg and spans 1966m. That's probably comparable to the weight/length ratio for a space elevator. It uses hi-tech materials, but it has to support its own weight across its entire length, and its going to be long! According to Nasa (google cache) the elevator is likely reach 36,000,000m. That's 18,311 times the length of the GGB
So taking the golden gate bridge as a guide, we can estimate the total weight of the cable at 18,311 x 380,800,000kg = 6.97 x 10^12. Seven gigatonnes - lighter than I expected.
How hard is it going to hit? Well, at least terminal velocity. I say "at least because the upper reaches will be going faster and have to be slowed by the atmosphere. Also the cable will be considerably denser than a human, so we can reckon it's terminal v as being rather more than a human's. Human terminal v is about 50m/s so let's go with that for the time being. We're being conservative..
Kinetic energy = 0,5 x mass x velocity x velocity
= 6.97294 x 10^12 x 50 x 50 / 2
= 8.716175 x 10^15 joules
And to put that in perspective, one megaton comes to about 4.184 x 10^15 Joules.
So if the cable came crashing down it'd release about 2 Megatons of kinetic energy - either as heat as it burnt up, or as shockwaves on impact.
Doesn't sound like much? Well, the Hiroshima bomb is reckoned as being 20 killotonnes yeild. So 200 hundred hiroshima bombs going off in a ring around the equator in fairly rapid succession.
and it it hits faster than that... well that's a square term. 100m/s give you 4 time the energy or 800 hiroshima bombs. 200m/s (not unreasonable) gives 16 times - 3,200 x hiroshima.
Don't get me wrong - I'd love to see a space elevator. Just let's bear in mind that this is dangerous
Think that magnitude of disruption might disrupt the weather patterns a little?
Personally, I hope that Eolas are going to do right by the OS/Free Software community - but they've given no indication that they will - which, since the default practice is to sue everyone in sight, is a little ominous.
Don't get me wrong - I'm delighted to see the little fellow get justice after being wronged by the Evil Microsoft. I just don't assume that the enemy of my enemy is necessarily my friend.
They'd leave the big boys. the ones with the atack lawyers, alone. On the other hand, if you were a small company who'd have difficulty fighting the battle in court, they might accidentally misclassify your domain as a typo BullyCorp Ltd and wait to see if you noticed.
And if, god help you, you were a private citizen who happened to be saying something unpopular, well the cahnces of an administrative "error" would go way up. And if you didn't like it, you can go to court. Assuming you have the time and money that is.
Not that I'm cynical or anything...
Even if such a flag exists, I'm not sure I trust them to honour it once a scheme like this starts generating revenue for them. They could morph their business from service provider to internet censors overnight. That'd be a popular movce in certain corporate and governmental circles.
Without the DNS returning an error for domain-not-found, I can't know if mis-typed. That is error correcting feedback (for me, not the computer) and I want it left on!
This is not an empty channel; this is not an unused resource, and what verisign are proposing is theft.
Not that that should come as a huge surpise to anyone, I suppose.
If the software already knows the correct resolution then it doesn't need a DNS service. If not, it has to trust them to return the proper values.
If they decide to return paid pages for each and every typo, how do you tell their "corrections" from proper DNS resolutions?
Anyony fancy a sweep? How long before someone decides that the correct spelling of "Linux" is W-I-N-D-O-W-S?
Seriously, yes that is very interesting. Do you have a reference?
The people do not exist to serve the law, the law exists to serve the people.
As a set up, this would be a work of genius. I mean something like this was going to happen sooner or later anyway, right? So - wy not get it out of the way early and under controlled circumstances.
Now, the very worst case has happened and lo! They paid up. Paid up without a gumble, but full of contrition and remorse to boot.
So when a genuine little girl gets targeted by they can well hell - the last one paid up no bother - what's your problem?
As for the rest of us, what possible excuse can we have for not stumping up your protection money when hard pressed single mums pay up without a murmur?
The scenario is a little too paranoid even for my tastes. On the other hand, real life is turning into a bad SF parody day by day.