If the expenditure of time to deal with that stuff becomes too much for me to think it's worth it, I can always unplug my computer from the net, or even go off and live in the wilderness for the rest of my life. If I get stabbed in the heart, I can't make a similar decision.
In the one case, I still have a choice as to whether I'm going to lose time or not. In the other, I don't have any choice.
Also, don't forget that this gives us an opening into asteroid mining, which would be much more practical than mining large bodies like the moon. Harpoon an asteroid, and gradually correct it's course until it makes a controlled re-entry, then just tear it apart for resources on the surface. Or leave it in orbit and use the materials there to build more structures in space without the expense of having to move materials out of a gravity well.
I've messed around with generating music by a method based on l-systems (which is really just a language for describing recursive patterns). You can get nice semi-random results because it takes large sequences which themselves 'make sense' to the ear (that is, some human composed the sequence) and then strings them together in ways that eventually repeat, but offset a few notes, giving a sense of theme (that pattern you heard at the beginning shows up at the end again). I wonder what those generated songs would look like under this visualize algorithm, and if there'd be a way to find the l-system that corresponds to the structure of a particular song.
There's no reason a particle can't correspond to a spatially distributed solution. Particles are used as models for elastic modes of crystals in solid state physics quite succesfully, even though a single 'particle' corresponds to a mode of oscillation that spans the entire crystal (they're called phonons). Similar things work for other systems in which there's a symmetry in the system which can be broken by various excitations. There's a theory (Goldstone theorem), involving these symmetry breaking excitations that tells you whether a 'particle' generated by that will be massive, massless, whatever ( http://carnot.physique.uvsq.fr/~kachkach/msn_conti nued.htm for an explanation pulled almost randomly from a google search )
Anyways, my point is, it's not necessarily as weird as it seems when you consider that one of the models for field theory is a bunch of harmonic oscillator potentials (which are important in that they give evenly spaced energy levels, so if you add an excitation, you have a linear increase of energy - i.e. something that behaves like an independant particle).
Opportunity cost is itself a flawed concept, or at the very least can't be used in an argument about making ends meet. For example:
Let's say I make a $30000/year salary but I could make a higher salary based on choosing a different job, and what I need for survival is $20000/year.
Now, my immediately available resources are that 30k/year, which is sufficient for me to survive. As I become aware of the money I could be making (i.e. my opportunity costs are more accurately determined) that doesn't change the answer to the question: do I have enough to survive? So even if my opportunity costs grow, they're always met by the growth of the number from which they're subtracted.
In the case of music sales, lets say that an artist has 10 dedicated customers who always buy their new songs, and they make new songs at a constant rate. The income from that would be roughly constant (barring inflation,...). Now, for every person who downloads a copy of one of those songs instead of buying it, there is an associated opportunity cost. However, there is also an associated resource which is brought into the system (i.e. that the person could buy the song means that the maximum the artist could make has also increased). So the net is zero, and answers to questions that hinge around reak monetary values aren't changed.
Actually, undergraduate physics programs often include some basic programming classes as part of a lab component (not hefty programming, but the kind of stuff needed to do data processing). And by the end of it, most people end up having some knowledge of programming just because it was needed or useful for one of their other courses. The impression I get is that the physics software at most universities is written by physicists, as opposed to non-physicists who were given the algorithm to implement.
It should be interesting to see what happens once computer generated voices become good enough to use instead of voice actors for stuff like this. It's not necessarily all that far off, since there are some physically based (modelling the physics of the vocal tract) methods which are just currently too computationally expensive to use on a large scale ('articulatory synthesis', for example http://www.praat.org ) which can do stuff like whispering, creaky voices, etc, and also handle how sounds affect neighboring sounds.
This is sort of like comparing the total taxes taken by the US with the salary of a single employer. There are scale issues, which is why individuals have different levels of control over resources (those very rich people also happen to control a very large number of workers). However, on a per-worker level, things tend towards equilibrium (workers as a commodity).
What really should be looked at is how often a particular paper is cited (or at least some metric based on that) so that papers which are just reprints of the same ideas won't get cited as often as things which are totally new.
Of course this fails for papers which are the endpoint of that branch of research, or applying general techniques to a specific problem of interest , though I suppose even there you'll get citations in engineering papers when people try to apply that idea and optimize it.
Well, it means that there's a finite set of unique thoughts that you could ever possibly have (i.e. a maximum amount of energy you can ever possibly get access to). I don't think there's anything here preventing you from stretching that energy out over an infinite time, though maybe you'd have to place that energy all at a geometric point to do so (or at least into a local ball which is collapsing at a sufficient rate).
The atmosphere is not predominantly water vapor. It's mostly nitrogen (79% I think), then oxygen, CO2, and trace gases (which includes water vapor). If the atmosphere were 79% water vapor, we'd need either: extremely low pressure, in which case we suffocate or extremely high temperature (near boiling), in which case our proteins denature. 100% humidity doesn't mean the air is entirely water vapor, it means that the amount of water vapor in the air has saturated (which occurs at small fractions of the total unless you're close to or above the boiling point of water).
So nitrogen IS the most common in the atmosphere. Now, I'd want to do a few back-of-the-envelope calculations to determine whether it's still most common if you include oceans, since even though the volume of the atmosphere is much larger than that of the oceans, the density is much less.
That's not true, at least for ferromagnets. The magnetized state is the low-energy state. The reason they become demagnetized when you heat them is that while the magnetized state is the lowest-energy state, it's also a low-entropy state, so above a certain critical temperature entropy effects win out. Look up the Ising model for calculations of this kind of thing.
It might be workable to make a CRPG that actually responds to the player's needs with rule changes. The premise would be: let the player succeed at everything they try but with a weighting factor based on the importance/significance of that action. For instance, the player would essentially get invisible bonuses in random encounters, so that they would only lose if they really weren't ready for that area at all. However, on an epic 'boss' type fight, they wouldn't get those bonuses. Similarly, if the party is out of money or 3 gold short for something and tries to pickpocket it, the game would let it succeed trivially, but if the party is already rich (beyond a certain threshold) the game ups the difficulty (equivalent to a GM saying 'okay, you've got enough, do something else now'). These would still be somewhat rigid as they'd have to be preprogrammed in.
A more sophisticated would be something that actually has a way of calculating how important arbitrary actions/events are with respect to the storyline, in the same sort of way as chess AI. That seems very difficult to implement without some very general way to describe the events of the game so that the computer can somehow 'understand' what's going on and what the consequences of party action are.
Re:Good for the RIAA. This is capitalism at work.
on
RIAA's Nasty Easter Egg
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The existance of copyright law prevents it from actually being a free market. As I'm sure has been pointed out several times, a single song is a unique commodity, there are not multiple sources. So sources cannot compete, and without competition, the price will not necessarily decrease to the minimal possible price the market can bear.
1.602x10^-19 is the charge of an electron in coulombs (or the conversion factor between joules and eV).
The 3x10^8 is the speed of light in meters. I'm not sure what the 10^-12 would be here, but it's probably something like the permittivity of free space since this looks a lot like some EM calculation.
You've got a sqrt(3) in there, and e^(j pi/6) is j/2 + sqrt(3)/2 so those are going to cancel out somewhat if you end up taking the real part.
Of course it could all be arbitrarily chosen random stuff, since he didn't give what the actual constants are.
Leaving all the variables means you actually know more about your answer than collapsing it into one big number. It means you can change units (same is true if you keep track of units) and know what part of your answer is based on exact fundamental constants and what part is based on some odd coincidence (314/100 != pi)
The best bet is to define symbols for all the fundamental constants of the problem, and then do the problem in units such that those symbols evaluate to 1, so then you have an answer which is cleanly separated between the stuff that scales and the stuff which is due to geometry/the specifics of your problem (cylinder as opposed to ellipsoid or sphere or cube with a hyperbola cut out of it)
An investor would probably prefer a company with a long-term stable income than one which will do well but then unpredictably crash (predictable crashes are a different game of course). So you'd think that evolutionary pressures would cause companies with long-term stable motives to dominate. And to an extent, those companies do exist - you just don't hear about them.
However, it isn't necessary for the meme 'maximize short term profit' to be beneficial as far as investments if it propagates itself faster than it fails. That is, if there's some bias to that solution that makes people try it over and over again and teach it to eachother, it'll survive whether or not it's advantageous, like a highly contagious virus that kills its host.
Release the mix as a series of time offsets and indecies to samples.
That way, the mix is entirely an original work and contains nothing of the works from which the samples are derived, but can be trivially combined into the final product.
So then, as long as the producer of the mix makes it clear that they have a 'clean' version to which they own a legal copyright, then the combined thing contains material from at least two parties, so neither party could claim the copyright on the combined object.
Actually, in the future you predict, the hobbyist work will not be inferior, because anyone not a hobbyist will not produce work. Sort of solves itself, doesn't it?
In a sense, eliminating copyright would show just how fundamental the need for a thing like music is. If people have a deep need for music, and yet it isn't being produced (for whatever reason), then they must learn to produce it themself. Look to the roots of music, and that's a likely result. Music didn't originate as a commodity, but rather as a form of expression and as ritual or tradition. So we'd either see an onrush of people desperate for music, creating it for their own consumption, or music would be shown to be a weak need - something we got addicted to, but which we don't feel the loss of. I tend to think the former is more likely than the latter, but either way, we end up doing what we need for our own satisfaction.
That is, if you held yourself to the same logical standards as you're trying to hold others, then you would not prevent other people from doing what they wanted with the code you took from GPL software. Which is the point of the above.
On the other hand, if you say that you can take code, but other people then can't take it from you, then you're being a hypocrite.
The GPL and other 'free' licenses are currently necessary because people are hypocrites. That is, corporations would have no problem taking freely available code, incorporating it into some closed program, and then complaining when other people copy, reverse engineer, etc that program.
The titanium dioxide is probably just a catalyst, so it won't be reduced by the reaction that converts the NOx. You'd lose more of the stuff to various forms of stresses and wear-and-tear. I'd look at diffusion of the stuff out of the paint layer, and ways to prevent that while still allowing access to the atmosphere. If diffusion isn't a big problem, then stuff like the paint peeling, being scraped off, and so on is probably the quickest way for the stuff to fail.
Your body does what you've described all the time using DNA as the storage device, and only a two-part complex to do the actual assembly (ribosomes). One problem is, there we're talking about assembling from a fairly well defined set of components which are themselves complex enough to have ways of being selective (an amino acid of a particular geometry will bind preferably to a particular other structure). When you're talking about single atoms, there isn't that much of a geometric factor acting in your benefit anymore. Of course, we even manage that somewhat, since there are particular proteins in our body which end up having a single metal ion of some type or other in the center of them (hemoglobin - iron, chlorophyll - magnesium). The question is, can we generalize this and make it externally controllable (i.e. we feed the DNA-equivalent in by some remote process that preferably doesn't involve changing the environment we're building in).
In the body, communication is usually done diffusing some chemical species that the other cells react to. So perhaps there'd be a byproduct of what one robot is building, and the others would be designed to be able to detect that byproduct to measure the local status. You should be able to build fairly complex uniform structures just knowing the local environment (periodic structures like crystals or networks), but it'd be difficult to build a single highly specified structure unless you used some other control mechanism with good spatial resolution, like in chip manufacture.
Because I wouldn't want to end up in court sued by some people who used a program that I developed in my free time and released 'because I might as well and maybe someone will improve it' when said program had some critical bug. 'No warranty' and 'we take no responsibility for damages' should be read as 'use at your own risk'. The problem comes when some external influence forces you to use a program with critical bugs - then you have no choice and you're not really accepting the terms of your own free will, but in that case, the people who forced you to use it (boss, etc) should be held accountable for the damages, just as you should be held accountable (by yourself, or by your employer) if you make the decision to use an insecure piece of software on your own system and damages result.
Slashdot Mirror
If the expenditure of time to deal with that stuff becomes too much for me to think it's worth it, I can always unplug my computer from the net, or even go off and live in the wilderness for the rest of my life. If I get stabbed in the heart, I can't make a similar decision.
In the one case, I still have a choice as to whether I'm going to lose time or not. In the other, I don't have any choice.
Also, don't forget that this gives us an opening into asteroid mining, which would be much more practical than mining large bodies like the moon. Harpoon an asteroid, and gradually correct it's course until it makes a controlled re-entry, then just tear it apart for resources on the surface. Or leave it in orbit and use the materials there to build more structures in space without the expense of having to move materials out of a gravity well.
I've messed around with generating music by a method based on l-systems (which is really just a language for describing recursive patterns). You can get nice semi-random results because it takes large sequences which themselves 'make sense' to the ear (that is, some human composed the sequence) and then strings them together in ways that eventually repeat, but offset a few notes, giving a sense of theme (that pattern you heard at the beginning shows up at the end again). I wonder what those generated songs would look like under this visualize algorithm, and if there'd be a way to find the l-system that corresponds to the structure of a particular song.
There's no reason a particle can't correspond to a spatially distributed solution. Particles are used as models for elastic modes of crystals in solid state physics quite succesfully, even though a single 'particle' corresponds to a mode of oscillation that spans the entire crystal (they're called phonons). Similar things work for other systems in which there's a symmetry in the system which can be broken by various excitations. There's a theory (Goldstone theorem), involving these symmetry breaking excitations that tells you whether a 'particle' generated by that will be massive, massless, whatever ( http://carnot.physique.uvsq.fr/~kachkach/msn_conti nued.htm for an explanation pulled almost randomly from a google search )
Anyways, my point is, it's not necessarily as weird as it seems when you consider that one of the models for field theory is a bunch of harmonic oscillator potentials (which are important in that they give evenly spaced energy levels, so if you add an excitation, you have a linear increase of energy - i.e. something that behaves like an independant particle).
Opportunity cost is itself a flawed concept, or at the very least can't be used in an argument about making ends meet. For example:
...). Now, for every person who downloads a copy of one of those songs instead of buying it, there is an associated opportunity cost. However, there is also an associated resource which is brought into the system (i.e. that the person could buy the song means that the maximum the artist could make has also increased). So the net is zero, and answers to questions that hinge around reak monetary values aren't changed.
Let's say I make a $30000/year salary but I could make a higher salary based on choosing a different job, and what I need for survival is $20000/year.
Now, my immediately available resources are that 30k/year, which is sufficient for me to survive. As I become aware of the money I could be making (i.e. my opportunity costs are more accurately determined) that doesn't change the answer to the question: do I have enough to survive? So even if my opportunity costs grow, they're always met by the growth of the number from which they're subtracted.
In the case of music sales, lets say that an artist has 10 dedicated customers who always buy their new songs, and they make new songs at a constant rate. The income from that would be roughly constant (barring inflation,
Actually, undergraduate physics programs often include some basic programming classes as part of a lab component (not hefty programming, but the kind of stuff needed to do data processing). And by the end of it, most people end up having some knowledge of programming just because it was needed or useful for one of their other courses. The impression I get is that the physics software at most universities is written by physicists, as opposed to non-physicists who were given the algorithm to implement.
Perhaps all of that copying is just a message to the content providers: 'this is what we believe your work/product is really worth'.
It should be interesting to see what happens once computer generated voices become good enough to use instead of voice actors for stuff like this. It's not necessarily all that far off, since there are some physically based (modelling the physics of the vocal tract) methods which are just currently too computationally expensive to use on a large scale ('articulatory synthesis', for example http://www.praat.org ) which can do stuff like whispering, creaky voices, etc, and also handle how sounds affect neighboring sounds.
This is sort of like comparing the total taxes taken by the US with the salary of a single employer. There are scale issues, which is why individuals have different levels of control over resources (those very rich people also happen to control a very large number of workers). However, on a per-worker level, things tend towards equilibrium (workers as a commodity).
What really should be looked at is how often a particular paper is cited (or at least some metric based on that) so that papers which are just reprints of the same ideas won't get cited as often as things which are totally new.
Of course this fails for papers which are the endpoint of that branch of research, or applying general techniques to a specific problem of interest , though I suppose even there you'll get citations in engineering papers when people try to apply that idea and optimize it.
Well, it means that there's a finite set of unique thoughts that you could ever possibly have (i.e. a maximum amount of energy you can ever possibly get access to). I don't think there's anything here preventing you from stretching that energy out over an infinite time, though maybe you'd have to place that energy all at a geometric point to do so (or at least into a local ball which is collapsing at a sufficient rate).
Just for fun, that's about 266 grams worth of energy.
The atmosphere is not predominantly water vapor. It's mostly nitrogen (79% I think), then oxygen, CO2, and trace gases (which includes water vapor). If the atmosphere were 79% water vapor, we'd need either: extremely low pressure, in which case we suffocate or extremely high temperature (near boiling), in which case our proteins denature. 100% humidity doesn't mean the air is entirely water vapor, it means that the amount of water vapor in the air has saturated (which occurs at small fractions of the total unless you're close to or above the boiling point of water).
So nitrogen IS the most common in the atmosphere. Now, I'd want to do a few back-of-the-envelope calculations to determine whether it's still most common if you include oceans, since even though the volume of the atmosphere is much larger than that of the oceans, the density is much less.
That's not true, at least for ferromagnets. The magnetized state is the low-energy state. The reason they become demagnetized when you heat them is that while the magnetized state is the lowest-energy state, it's also a low-entropy state, so above a certain critical temperature entropy effects win out. Look up the Ising model for calculations of this kind of thing.
It might be workable to make a CRPG that actually responds to the player's needs with rule changes. The premise would be: let the player succeed at everything they try but with a weighting factor based on the importance/significance of that action. For instance, the player would essentially get invisible bonuses in random encounters, so that they would only lose if they really weren't ready for that area at all. However, on an epic 'boss' type fight, they wouldn't get those bonuses. Similarly, if the party is out of money or 3 gold short for something and tries to pickpocket it, the game would let it succeed trivially, but if the party is already rich (beyond a certain threshold) the game ups the difficulty (equivalent to a GM saying 'okay, you've got enough, do something else now'). These would still be somewhat rigid as they'd have to be preprogrammed in.
A more sophisticated would be something that actually has a way of calculating how important arbitrary actions/events are with respect to the storyline, in the same sort of way as chess AI. That seems very difficult to implement without some very general way to describe the events of the game so that the computer can somehow 'understand' what's going on and what the consequences of party action are.
The existance of copyright law prevents it from actually being a free market. As I'm sure has been pointed out several times, a single song is a unique commodity, there are not multiple sources. So sources cannot compete, and without competition, the price will not necessarily decrease to the minimal possible price the market can bear.
1.602x10^-19 is the charge of an electron in coulombs (or the conversion factor between joules and eV).
The 3x10^8 is the speed of light in meters. I'm not sure what the 10^-12 would be here, but it's probably something like the permittivity of free space since this looks a lot like some EM calculation.
You've got a sqrt(3) in there, and e^(j pi/6) is j/2 + sqrt(3)/2 so those are going to cancel out somewhat if you end up taking the real part.
Of course it could all be arbitrarily chosen random stuff, since he didn't give what the actual constants are.
Leaving all the variables means you actually know more about your answer than collapsing it into one big number. It means you can change units (same is true if you keep track of units) and know what part of your answer is based on exact fundamental constants and what part is based on some odd coincidence (314/100 != pi)
The best bet is to define symbols for all the fundamental constants of the problem, and then do the problem in units such that those symbols evaluate to 1, so then you have an answer which is cleanly separated between the stuff that scales and the stuff which is due to geometry/the specifics of your problem (cylinder as opposed to ellipsoid or sphere or cube with a hyperbola cut out of it)
An investor would probably prefer a company with a long-term stable income than one which will do well but then unpredictably crash (predictable crashes are a different game of course). So you'd think that evolutionary pressures would cause companies with long-term stable motives to dominate. And to an extent, those companies do exist - you just don't hear about them.
However, it isn't necessary for the meme 'maximize short term profit' to be beneficial as far as investments if it propagates itself faster than it fails. That is, if there's some bias to that solution that makes people try it over and over again and teach it to eachother, it'll survive whether or not it's advantageous, like a highly contagious virus that kills its host.
Or something like that.
Somehow I'd think that Godwin's law wouldn't apply in an actual discussion about eugenics.
This suggests a workaround though:
Release the mix as a series of time offsets and indecies to samples.
That way, the mix is entirely an original work and contains nothing of the works from which the samples are derived, but can be trivially combined into the final product.
So then, as long as the producer of the mix makes it clear that they have a 'clean' version to which they own a legal copyright, then the combined thing contains material from at least two parties, so neither party could claim the copyright on the combined object.
Standard IANAL disclaimer applies.
Actually, in the future you predict, the hobbyist work will not be inferior, because anyone not a hobbyist will not produce work. Sort of solves itself, doesn't it?
In a sense, eliminating copyright would show just how fundamental the need for a thing like music is. If people have a deep need for music, and yet it isn't being produced (for whatever reason), then they must learn to produce it themself. Look to the roots of music, and that's a likely result. Music didn't originate as a commodity, but rather as a form of expression and as ritual or tradition. So we'd either see an onrush of people desperate for music, creating it for their own consumption, or music would be shown to be a weak need - something we got addicted to, but which we don't feel the loss of. I tend to think the former is more likely than the latter, but either way, we end up doing what we need for our own satisfaction.
In an ideal world, I'd agree with that.
That is, if you held yourself to the same logical standards as you're trying to hold others, then you would not prevent other people from doing what they wanted with the code you took from GPL software. Which is the point of the above.
On the other hand, if you say that you can take code, but other people then can't take it from you, then you're being a hypocrite.
The GPL and other 'free' licenses are currently necessary because people are hypocrites. That is, corporations would have no problem taking freely available code, incorporating it into some closed program, and then complaining when other people copy, reverse engineer, etc that program.
The titanium dioxide is probably just a catalyst, so it won't be reduced by the reaction that converts the NOx. You'd lose more of the stuff to various forms of stresses and wear-and-tear. I'd look at diffusion of the stuff out of the paint layer, and ways to prevent that while still allowing access to the atmosphere. If diffusion isn't a big problem, then stuff like the paint peeling, being scraped off, and so on is probably the quickest way for the stuff to fail.
Your body does what you've described all the time using DNA as the storage device, and only a two-part complex to do the actual assembly (ribosomes). One problem is, there we're talking about assembling from a fairly well defined set of components which are themselves complex enough to have ways of being selective (an amino acid of a particular geometry will bind preferably to a particular other structure). When you're talking about single atoms, there isn't that much of a geometric factor acting in your benefit anymore. Of course, we even manage that somewhat, since there are particular proteins in our body which end up having a single metal ion of some type or other in the center of them (hemoglobin - iron, chlorophyll - magnesium). The question is, can we generalize this and make it externally controllable (i.e. we feed the DNA-equivalent in by some remote process that preferably doesn't involve changing the environment we're building in).
In the body, communication is usually done diffusing some chemical species that the other cells react to. So perhaps there'd be a byproduct of what one robot is building, and the others would be designed to be able to detect that byproduct to measure the local status. You should be able to build fairly complex uniform structures just knowing the local environment (periodic structures like crystals or networks), but it'd be difficult to build a single highly specified structure unless you used some other control mechanism with good spatial resolution, like in chip manufacture.
Because I wouldn't want to end up in court sued by some people who used a program that I developed in my free time and released 'because I might as well and maybe someone will improve it' when said program had some critical bug. 'No warranty' and 'we take no responsibility for damages' should be read as 'use at your own risk'. The problem comes when some external influence forces you to use a program with critical bugs - then you have no choice and you're not really accepting the terms of your own free will, but in that case, the people who forced you to use it (boss, etc) should be held accountable for the damages, just as you should be held accountable (by yourself, or by your employer) if you make the decision to use an insecure piece of software on your own system and damages result.