Mark my words, pretty soon we will not be 'buying' anything, but will be 'licensing' lipstick and shampoo and hotdogs and underpants for 'personal use only', just like software.
Just FIY for those of you who've been on the Moon for the last 25 years, for all the chest-thumping economic rhetoric about the free market, it is completely ignored by companies who are actually interested in profit. Why? Because you can't make a profit in a competitive market. It's as simple as that. True competition drives profit margins down to subsistence levels. If you want to haul in billions you need to have a minimally competitive market: monopoly, oligopoly or cartel.
Reading through the rest of this thread, I don't see people rally discussing the bigger issue of why you can't get every phone in the US market. Obviously there are some phones that won't work because they don't run on the 900/1800 mhz frequencies that the US uses, but how can Motorola - an American company - make phones that aren't available in the US? In a 'free' market how does that make any sense?
Does this mean this rather lenient deal the RIAA has accepted can be used as a precedent for future cases? Will it prevent them from successfully reaming people's grandmothers with 7-figure lawsuits? Hope so.
The energy contained in 150,000 gallons of diesel @85% = 150,000 gallons/year x 133,000 BTU/gallon x.000293 kwh/BTU = 5.8MMkwh/year acre. The energy falling on one acre of land = 5kwh/m2 - day x 365 days/year x 4046 m2/acre = 7.4MM kwh/year - acre. 5.8/7.4 =.78. That is about 78% efficiency in converting sunlight to liquid energy.
I incorrectly remembered the 85% figure, which is a different measure, but it's still in the same neighborhood.
Looking at your calculation, you seem to have forgotten to convert BTUs into joules. 1 BTU = 1,054 joules. That put your calculation out by a factor of 1000. You got 0.07%, when the actual number is closer to 70%.
You have to be careful of these kinds of companies' claims. I remember getting interested in a biodiesel-from-algae-grown-vertically project run by an outfit called Global Green Solutions (www.globalgreensolutions.com). They claimed to be able to get 150,000 gallons per acre per year, which is 1000 times the output of oil palm and other biodiesel crops - and 15 times more than other folks' projections for regular algae ponds. It all sounded great, until the basic calculations showed that their 'projections' would have meant converting 85% of the TOTAL solar energy directly into stored energy in the fuel - a physical impossibility. I called their bluff, and they just shrugged and said, "our 100-million-gallon-per-year plant will be open next year and then you'll see." Well, it's now next year, and you can imagine what happened. Nothing.
I'll just respond to say that mine was not a strawman argument. I've lived in developing countries for nearly two decades. The need for laptops is not just slightly but grotesquely outweighed by the need for more urgent measures of socioeconomic redress, of which safe drinking water and reliable electricity are merely the tip of the iceberg. The notion that delivering laptop computers to millions of children in the developing world is somehow a constructive use of time, energy and financial resources given - just for example - the genocide that is occurring in Darfur and the more than one million unlawfully displaced refugees currently on the edge of starvation in Uganda, is catastrophically naive and speaks to the appalling ignorance and cultural ethnocentricity of this project's primary actors. What it shows is that we have a very serious problem in how the west - and America in particular - views the rest of the world through the lens of its own myopic concerns.
Mod my comment flamebait if you like. It's true nonetheless. If you don't agree, try making a rational argument to the contrary instead of just using your mod points to mark comments down that you disagree with.
As long as kids around the world are dying from diarrhea because they don't have running water or electricity, this is still a dumb idea. And speaking of no electricity, I take it these laptops are either solar or bicycle powered?
I appreciate your insightful response. I honestly don't know enough about the connection between privacy and liberty, and that's no one's fault but my own. As a result, I'm not fully seeing the connection between the right to personal privacy and being forced to do something that most people would agree is humiliating - walking down the street naked and shitting in a bucket, to take your example. I'm not the kind of person who finds things like that humiliating, as I am almost immune to embarrassment, but I can empathize with those who do. Personally, I'd be more concerned about offending others.
Another poster raised the issue of the importance of confidential information like PIN numbers and bank account numbers. In that case, privacy makes very good sense to me. But I'm not sure I see the incompatibility between disclosure to the government and personal security. As an analogy, I don't care if people see the inside of my apartment, but that doesn't mean I don't lock the door behind me when I go out. I also genuinely don't understand the 2nd Amendment - I'm not being facetious when I ask why we shouldn't be able to ask defendants if they committed a crime. Another poster said this interferes with the innocent-until-proven-guilty concept, but I don't understand why.
I can also understand how important it is to people to be able to keep things like medical information private. People seem to feel that it isn't an insurance company or employer's business if you've had cancer or an STD in the past. Again, I can empathize with this, but when push comes to shove I come down more on the side of truth, honesty and transparency. If information is legitimately relevant to the decisions other people make - like whether you're an insurance risk or not - then I see neither any harm in asking nor any reason why people feel they should have the right to lie about themselves. Regarding employment, people seem to think that this opens the door to discrimination. For example, it is argued that you shouldn't be able to ask someone what their race or sexual orientation is. I agree with this, but only because those things are genuinely irrelevant, and not because people have the right to withhold information from others. To take an extreme example, consider that a person with Ebola might wish to have the right to privacy about their medical condition. Would anyone agree this right is inviolate, when withholding such information can potentially affect others in a negative way? The negative effects are extreme in this hyperbolic example, but the point remains: why should we be able to lie or withhold information to serve our own interests at the expense of others? Isn't truth always in society's best interest?
I absolutely agree that people should have the right to regulate certain parts of their own lives - their private lives. What consenting adults do in the bedroom, for instance, doesn't seem to me to be anyone else's business. But then, I don't think people should feel squeamish or ashamed about what they do in the bedroom either. If it was possible to predict with 95% certainty who was going to commit murders by watching them have sex, then I'd be the first to sign up to let the government put a camera in my bedroom. But it doesn't necessarily follow that I'd want it broadcast. Again, there's a difference between privacy and security, between what is personal and what is secret, but I'm so woefully ignorant about the law that I probably shouldn't even be discussing it.
Lastly, I'm happy to put my money where my mouth is. I'm currently about $20k in debt, out on 3 credit cards. This doesn't include the ones I'm fighting that were taken out in my name last year when I was the victim of identity theft. I'm taking the summer off to work on a book, so I'm currently unemployed. I was employed by an international nonprofit economic development agency for several years prior, and I'm hoping - but not certain - to be employed in Hawaii at the end of the summer. My bank balance is a
As someone with nothing to hide, I have to say I don't have much of a problem with the government recording and listening to my phone calls, and I don't have a huge amount of sympathy for people who do. I suppose that makes me a bad person of some kind, but if they catch the guy with the suitcase nuke before he vaporizes LA and they catch the mutherfucker who took out to credit cards in my name last year then I could care less if they also bust people who are trying to cheat on their taxes who would otherwise have gotten away with it because of their privacy protection.
I guess I just care a lot more about truth than about process. That's not to say that process is completely unimportant, but I definitely fall further on the spectrum toward prioritizing truth. I don't think much of the 5th Ammendment, for example. Why should you be able to ask someone under oath, "did you kill him?" at a murder trial? I don't want to hear that the slam-dunk evidence against the pedophile is 'inadmissible' because cops didn't follow procedure. But I guess that's just me.
Achieving it for 'stuff' in general, which seems to be the aim of the Semantic Web, is probably flat-out impossible.
I doubt it's impossible. You just need some intelligent filtering algorithms. Think of Google's fault-tolerant searches: if I accidentally spell 'Mississippi' as 'Misisipi' Google will ask, 'did you mean Mississippi?'. It's not exactly rocket science. And it's not much of a leap from that to software that can look at a web page displaying, say, times and dates and addresses and, even though the format may differ slightly from that used by Outlook, still extract the information automatically with a high degree of accuracy. This, incidentally, seems to me a useful intermediate step on the way to genuine AI.
I've never studied information theory, so I'm woefully ignorant, but as I understand it, it was Shannon himself who defined information content as the amount by which a recipient's ignorance is reduced. Here's what I don't understand, and hope someone here will be able to explain:
It makes sense to me that you can measure how much information is contained, say, in a text message. But to interpret that information you need... what? We usually fill in the blank with 'intelligence', but it seems to me that interpretation itself requires, at the very least, some information - the 'look-up tables' as it were. But you also need information about what a look-up table is, and how do you look that up, and so on, reducto ad infinitum, and so once again... 'intelligence'. So here's my point: doesn't it follow that a certain amount of information is also required in order to interpret information? And isn't that, itself, an inseparable measure of any information being transmitted?
From this, I extrapolate the following right out of my colon: it's fine to say that a string of text contains 100 bits, but those bits are only extractable given an adequate, non-zero sum of interpretor-side information. Simpler collections of information - say, 100 bits, require less interpretor-side information, ie: less intelligence, to be decoded. More complex collections of information, say a recording of Beethoven's 5th symphony, require far more interpretor-side information to decode. I could of course be dead wrong about this. But to continue, it also seems to me that if more information on the interpretor-side, i.e. intelligence, is required in order to extract more information, then this could mean that more information can also be imputed from a given block of data. A particular rendition of Beethoven's 5th contains much more information to a classical violinist than a non-musician, for example. Is it possible that the density of information in a block of data is actually affected by the interpretor-side information? Like some sort of Rorschach test, I could look at a string of 100 bits and infer and impute a gargantuan amount of information from it. Consider this more numerical analogy: I can 'decode' a text block of 100 bits with an infinite number of 'keys' and get a different output each time. So what information is actually stored in the block itself, irrespective of my decoding keys? Could it instead be that information doesn't really exist on one side or the other - message vs recipient - but can only be defined in terms of both together?
Fruity pebbles, I know, but I've been curious about this for years.
I've only briefly used Vista, but it feels exactly like any other XP skin I've ever encountered. None of the long standing problems with the Windows GUI were fixed, including my personal pet peeve: tearing and flickering 2D graphics. I just don't understand how Windows still fails to address the problem of syncing refresh rates when Mac had it sorted more than a decade ago.
Your point is well made, and - it seems to me - fairly obvious. Why is computer science different from other science? You need more than just math to be a chemist or biologist or anthropologist. Why should we expect CS to be any different?
Well, it's a shame that Roswell gets all the attention because it turns out there is a logical explanation for what happened. In thousands of other UFO sightings, no such explanation is available. The most compelling one to me is the black triangle incident with the Belgian Air Force, where the government has come right out and said that they have no terrestrial explanation for what all of their radar installations and two F16s witnessed, and that really leaves very few alternative explanations.
It's a shame the subject of UFOs is ridiculed instead of taken seriously, and of course that is due in large part to the goofball social community surrounding unexplained phenomena. This Roswell celebration is, sadly, a prime example. If instead we had five million people march on Washington and demand the truth, we might get some real disclosure.
At what point is it simply not worth the effort to write a new virus?
I assume it's getting more and more difficult to write viruses as time goes by - is that correct? If this is indeed an arms race, then one side or the other is going to run out of time and energy and money sooner or later, and I'm guessing it won't be the AV companies since there's so much at stake.
As much as I want to believe aliens are among us, it just doesn't make sense that a civilization advanced enough to cross interstellar space would crash in New Mexico. And the chances of aliens being humanoid in appearance are close to zero.
Seems like social solutions work better than technical ones anyway, at least in my limited online gaming experience. I used to play counterstrike and BF2, and cheating was fairly common, but when enough people complained that a person was cheating that person got kicked and banned. That's a social remedy. My guess is that stuff is going to work better than technical remedies in most cases. Other human players are still better at detecting cheaters than hardware or software watchdogs. If players are encouraged to watch each other diligently and report suspected cheating, and if people get kicked/banned after being reported 5 times or whatever, then social pressures will create a non-cheating environment. There is room for abuse of this system, of course, but in general it settles into a cheat-free equilibrium for most of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't they already have a few of these working at the White House?
Mark my words, pretty soon we will not be 'buying' anything, but will be 'licensing' lipstick and shampoo and hotdogs and underpants for 'personal use only', just like software.
Just FIY for those of you who've been on the Moon for the last 25 years, for all the chest-thumping economic rhetoric about the free market, it is completely ignored by companies who are actually interested in profit. Why? Because you can't make a profit in a competitive market. It's as simple as that. True competition drives profit margins down to subsistence levels. If you want to haul in billions you need to have a minimally competitive market: monopoly, oligopoly or cartel.
Reading through the rest of this thread, I don't see people rally discussing the bigger issue of why you can't get every phone in the US market. Obviously there are some phones that won't work because they don't run on the 900/1800 mhz frequencies that the US uses, but how can Motorola - an American company - make phones that aren't available in the US? In a 'free' market how does that make any sense?
Does this mean this rather lenient deal the RIAA has accepted can be used as a precedent for future cases? Will it prevent them from successfully reaming people's grandmothers with 7-figure lawsuits? Hope so.
The energy contained in 150,000 gallons of diesel @85% = 150,000 gallons/year x 133,000 BTU/gallon x .000293 kwh/BTU = 5.8MMkwh/year acre. The energy falling on one acre of land = 5kwh/m2 - day x 365 days/year x 4046 m2/acre = 7.4MM kwh/year - acre. 5.8/7.4 = .78. That is about 78% efficiency in converting sunlight to liquid energy.
I incorrectly remembered the 85% figure, which is a different measure, but it's still in the same neighborhood.
Looking at your calculation, you seem to have forgotten to convert BTUs into joules. 1 BTU = 1,054 joules. That put your calculation out by a factor of 1000. You got 0.07%, when the actual number is closer to 70%.
I wish you were right though.
You have to be careful of these kinds of companies' claims. I remember getting interested in a biodiesel-from-algae-grown-vertically project run by an outfit called Global Green Solutions (www.globalgreensolutions.com). They claimed to be able to get 150,000 gallons per acre per year, which is 1000 times the output of oil palm and other biodiesel crops - and 15 times more than other folks' projections for regular algae ponds. It all sounded great, until the basic calculations showed that their 'projections' would have meant converting 85% of the TOTAL solar energy directly into stored energy in the fuel - a physical impossibility. I called their bluff, and they just shrugged and said, "our 100-million-gallon-per-year plant will be open next year and then you'll see." Well, it's now next year, and you can imagine what happened. Nothing.
I'll just respond to say that mine was not a strawman argument. I've lived in developing countries for nearly two decades. The need for laptops is not just slightly but grotesquely outweighed by the need for more urgent measures of socioeconomic redress, of which safe drinking water and reliable electricity are merely the tip of the iceberg. The notion that delivering laptop computers to millions of children in the developing world is somehow a constructive use of time, energy and financial resources given - just for example - the genocide that is occurring in Darfur and the more than one million unlawfully displaced refugees currently on the edge of starvation in Uganda, is catastrophically naive and speaks to the appalling ignorance and cultural ethnocentricity of this project's primary actors. What it shows is that we have a very serious problem in how the west - and America in particular - views the rest of the world through the lens of its own myopic concerns.
Mod my comment flamebait if you like. It's true nonetheless. If you don't agree, try making a rational argument to the contrary instead of just using your mod points to mark comments down that you disagree with.
As long as kids around the world are dying from diarrhea because they don't have running water or electricity, this is still a dumb idea. And speaking of no electricity, I take it these laptops are either solar or bicycle powered?
Another poster raised the issue of the importance of confidential information like PIN numbers and bank account numbers. In that case, privacy makes very good sense to me. But I'm not sure I see the incompatibility between disclosure to the government and personal security. As an analogy, I don't care if people see the inside of my apartment, but that doesn't mean I don't lock the door behind me when I go out. I also genuinely don't understand the 2nd Amendment - I'm not being facetious when I ask why we shouldn't be able to ask defendants if they committed a crime. Another poster said this interferes with the innocent-until-proven-guilty concept, but I don't understand why.
I can also understand how important it is to people to be able to keep things like medical information private. People seem to feel that it isn't an insurance company or employer's business if you've had cancer or an STD in the past. Again, I can empathize with this, but when push comes to shove I come down more on the side of truth, honesty and transparency. If information is legitimately relevant to the decisions other people make - like whether you're an insurance risk or not - then I see neither any harm in asking nor any reason why people feel they should have the right to lie about themselves. Regarding employment, people seem to think that this opens the door to discrimination. For example, it is argued that you shouldn't be able to ask someone what their race or sexual orientation is. I agree with this, but only because those things are genuinely irrelevant, and not because people have the right to withhold information from others. To take an extreme example, consider that a person with Ebola might wish to have the right to privacy about their medical condition. Would anyone agree this right is inviolate, when withholding such information can potentially affect others in a negative way? The negative effects are extreme in this hyperbolic example, but the point remains: why should we be able to lie or withhold information to serve our own interests at the expense of others? Isn't truth always in society's best interest?
I absolutely agree that people should have the right to regulate certain parts of their own lives - their private lives. What consenting adults do in the bedroom, for instance, doesn't seem to me to be anyone else's business. But then, I don't think people should feel squeamish or ashamed about what they do in the bedroom either. If it was possible to predict with 95% certainty who was going to commit murders by watching them have sex, then I'd be the first to sign up to let the government put a camera in my bedroom. But it doesn't necessarily follow that I'd want it broadcast. Again, there's a difference between privacy and security, between what is personal and what is secret, but I'm so woefully ignorant about the law that I probably shouldn't even be discussing it.
Lastly, I'm happy to put my money where my mouth is. I'm currently about $20k in debt, out on 3 credit cards. This doesn't include the ones I'm fighting that were taken out in my name last year when I was the victim of identity theft. I'm taking the summer off to work on a book, so I'm currently unemployed. I was employed by an international nonprofit economic development agency for several years prior, and I'm hoping - but not certain - to be employed in Hawaii at the end of the summer. My bank balance is a
Oops - typo, should have read: "why SHOULDN'T you be able to ask someone under oath, "did you kill him?" at a murder trial?
I guess I just care a lot more about truth than about process. That's not to say that process is completely unimportant, but I definitely fall further on the spectrum toward prioritizing truth. I don't think much of the 5th Ammendment, for example. Why should you be able to ask someone under oath, "did you kill him?" at a murder trial? I don't want to hear that the slam-dunk evidence against the pedophile is 'inadmissible' because cops didn't follow procedure. But I guess that's just me.
I doubt it's impossible. You just need some intelligent filtering algorithms. Think of Google's fault-tolerant searches: if I accidentally spell 'Mississippi' as 'Misisipi' Google will ask, 'did you mean Mississippi?'. It's not exactly rocket science. And it's not much of a leap from that to software that can look at a web page displaying, say, times and dates and addresses and, even though the format may differ slightly from that used by Outlook, still extract the information automatically with a high degree of accuracy. This, incidentally, seems to me a useful intermediate step on the way to genuine AI.
It makes sense to me that you can measure how much information is contained, say, in a text message. But to interpret that information you need ... what? We usually fill in the blank with 'intelligence', but it seems to me that interpretation itself requires, at the very least, some information - the 'look-up tables' as it were. But you also need information about what a look-up table is, and how do you look that up, and so on, reducto ad infinitum, and so once again ... 'intelligence'. So here's my point: doesn't it follow that a certain amount of information is also required in order to interpret information? And isn't that, itself, an inseparable measure of any information being transmitted?
From this, I extrapolate the following right out of my colon: it's fine to say that a string of text contains 100 bits, but those bits are only extractable given an adequate, non-zero sum of interpretor-side information. Simpler collections of information - say, 100 bits, require less interpretor-side information, ie: less intelligence, to be decoded. More complex collections of information, say a recording of Beethoven's 5th symphony, require far more interpretor-side information to decode. I could of course be dead wrong about this. But to continue, it also seems to me that if more information on the interpretor-side, i.e. intelligence, is required in order to extract more information, then this could mean that more information can also be imputed from a given block of data. A particular rendition of Beethoven's 5th contains much more information to a classical violinist than a non-musician, for example. Is it possible that the density of information in a block of data is actually affected by the interpretor-side information? Like some sort of Rorschach test, I could look at a string of 100 bits and infer and impute a gargantuan amount of information from it. Consider this more numerical analogy: I can 'decode' a text block of 100 bits with an infinite number of 'keys' and get a different output each time. So what information is actually stored in the block itself, irrespective of my decoding keys? Could it instead be that information doesn't really exist on one side or the other - message vs recipient - but can only be defined in terms of both together?
Fruity pebbles, I know, but I've been curious about this for years.
Are books better than book reviews?
Am I the only one who finds the idea of robots teaching autistic children to be social slightly ironic?
I've only briefly used Vista, but it feels exactly like any other XP skin I've ever encountered. None of the long standing problems with the Windows GUI were fixed, including my personal pet peeve: tearing and flickering 2D graphics. I just don't understand how Windows still fails to address the problem of syncing refresh rates when Mac had it sorted more than a decade ago.
Your point is well made, and - it seems to me - fairly obvious. Why is computer science different from other science? You need more than just math to be a chemist or biologist or anthropologist. Why should we expect CS to be any different?
It's a shame the subject of UFOs is ridiculed instead of taken seriously, and of course that is due in large part to the goofball social community surrounding unexplained phenomena. This Roswell celebration is, sadly, a prime example. If instead we had five million people march on Washington and demand the truth, we might get some real disclosure.
I assume it's getting more and more difficult to write viruses as time goes by - is that correct? If this is indeed an arms race, then one side or the other is going to run out of time and energy and money sooner or later, and I'm guessing it won't be the AV companies since there's so much at stake.
Someone might want to mention this to the President...
A childhood nickname, nothing more.
I disagree. I think humanity is more than ready, and it would do us an enormous amount of good.
As much as I want to believe aliens are among us, it just doesn't make sense that a civilization advanced enough to cross interstellar space would crash in New Mexico. And the chances of aliens being humanoid in appearance are close to zero.
Seems like social solutions work better than technical ones anyway, at least in my limited online gaming experience. I used to play counterstrike and BF2, and cheating was fairly common, but when enough people complained that a person was cheating that person got kicked and banned. That's a social remedy. My guess is that stuff is going to work better than technical remedies in most cases. Other human players are still better at detecting cheaters than hardware or software watchdogs. If players are encouraged to watch each other diligently and report suspected cheating, and if people get kicked/banned after being reported 5 times or whatever, then social pressures will create a non-cheating environment. There is room for abuse of this system, of course, but in general it settles into a cheat-free equilibrium for most of the time.