Now, of course, the real debate begins. How much more will consumers be willing to pay for safe vehicles, and what limitations on speed will they accept? Rolling out this technology (if you'll excuse the play on words) will require changes in infrastructure, law, and cultural mentality. Especially here in the states. If it means saving this many lives, will you pay twice as much and drive at half speed, at least for a little while? Even more so, how much would people be willing to not drive at all?
It's kind of interesting how much effort has gone in to building a robot that can drive in (error-prone) human traffic. If, on the other hand, *every* car was automated, it would be so much easier to implement. (Controls built into the road, maybe, and of course less need to handle wildly out-of-control cars; plus benefits like optimized freeways (anyone remember "Blue Thunder"'s freeway?) and intelligent intersections that talk to incoming cars, etc.) I think the eventual progression is to automated and efficient public transportation, where no one owns their own car, nor needs to. Did anybody consider, back in the day, if one car per person/family was actually a good idea?
How far this technology has come in just a few years is (ridiculously) amazing. Major kudos to everyone who's brought this so far!
I only wish that one of the conditions of winning was to release the software that powered your car - can you imagine how much farther things would have come if everyone could build on the previous years' winners? So much brilliant coding has gone into this, but so much of it is just reinventing the wheel. (...Ouch.) But in all honesty, the state of the art would progress gigantically if one of the winners would GPL their car-driving software.
No kidding, eh? I totally agree with you. "Similarities", what? That's what I find so ridiculous about this. The blank CD levy is because when I buy CDs, artists aren't getting paid and I could use the CD for illegal-downloading reasons. When I buy music from iTunes, the artist is getting paid, directly! There's no similarity at all - one, I am buying a potentially "piracy-assisting" tool, the other, I am buying music, just like buying a CD.
Why is that so obvious to us, but not to SOCAN or the copyright board people?
Does anyone have a clue how this is supposed to be a good idea? The only thing I can possibly think of is that a) the fee will hurt independent sellers more than CRIA aligned sellers (conspiracy), b) it's designed to be absurd to help kill the levy which the CRIA dislikes(conspiracy), or c) the story as reported by MacNN is inaccurate since I've never heard of them and was too lazy to look through the 65 page pdf(conspiracy or stupidity). The story on MacNN seems genuine, at least compared to what I read yesterday; it seems like the CRIA aren't the bad guys for once (although I'm guessing they also support the CD tax); it sounds to me like SOCAN just wants as much money as it can get its hands on.
I too don't have any clue how this is supposed to be a good idea.
So until now, we could assume that when we bought music from iTunes et al., a certain amount went to that company and a certain amount went to the artist. According to a record-producing-artist friend of mine, he actually gets a very decent cut as an indie artist with iTunes (especially considering the lack of material+hosting costs). Now, with this tax (considering that it goes to SOCAN, I'm not sure if that is even the right word), iTunes will get the same cut, SOCAN will get 3% or so, and the artist will get the rest - which is less going to the artist than before (assuming that iTunes doesn't up their prices, but if they do, the same holds true because less people will buy, meaning still less for the artists.) By applying this, isn't SOCAN stealing from the artists?! As in *money* stealing. SOCAN is supposed to represent Canadian artists (by collecting radio royalties and so forth). How on earth does this help their members?! Ludricrous.
It would be comparable, I guess, to SOCAN collecting a tax on CD purchases. The whole beauty of internet distribution is getting rid of (or reducing the number of) middlemen. This is destroying every incentive people have to *support the artist*, which seems completely against what the whole point of SOCAN was. So if I make a band and sell my music using paypal, do I have to write cheques giving 3% of my profits to SOCAN? What am I getting from them? How does this help the artists? How does this help the industry? *
Down with middlemen.
* "While no public responses have been made, the Copyright Board report notes that both Apple and the RIAA-equivalent Canadian Recording Industry Association were heavily involved in resisting proposed rates." So even the CRIA's against it. Who the heck is SOCAN representing?
Just a few corrections to the article:
The youtube link is to the U of S's winning round last year; it's now the third annual space elevator competition. The rest of the article is correct. It's worth noting that the height and speed requirements are double what they were last year.
Hopefully the weather will be better tomorrow and the competitions will continue! All the best to all the teams... and especially the USST, of course.:-)
The problem in my opinion is that people fail to understand there are people who download not because they are unwilling to pay for stuff they want but because they only slightly want what they download - not enough to pay for it if that was the only way to obtain it. Hence if tomorrow all the illegal sources where silenced - what we would see is not so much of a rise in sales as a drop in total consumption of a product (illegal + legal). Definitely agree. Before I got an mp3 player (and began downloading), I had bought one CD. In all my life. Since then, I've bought another; both were recorded by friends of mine. This idea that "millions of people don't buy CDs because they download all the CDs they would have bought instead" has been really bashed into our heads by the media companies (who don't want to admit why else pop CDs could be flopping). Some people just don't buy CDs; I don't think I'm the only one. Before file-sharing, I just didn't listen to recorded music at all.
Keep in mind that milliseconds are a human invention; if the signal was an extra-terrestrial message, the fact that it lined up with human time measurements would be a coincidence (and an unlikely one at that). This sounds more like a "human creation" - ie, either of the two possibilities that NeutronCowboy mentioned.
...(i'm still on dial-up)... Several months ago I was actually asked to set up dial-up for a local company (I was floored... it's really quite unthinkable where I live.) But the manager of the place had been enjoying dial-up on his (still running) 1994 ThinkPad for years, so I got them set up with the pay-per-use dialup option. It gives dog slow a new meaning. But it costs them 3 dollars a month! Whatever works, I guess...
Although, they make up for it with "account expiry" times lasting a month. I'm using their Pay-As-You-Go; I normally spend about $5/month. However, if I don't "top up" (stupid buzzwords!) my account every month, I'll lose the current account balance. It wouldn't be a problem if they let you pay in increments less than *fifteen* dollars at a time! After using the phone since Christmas, I have about $80 in my account, and if I don't keep on paying $15/month I'll lose that. Consider it already gone.
Sorry to rant. It's just really annoying that no cell company anywhere will charge as low as they say they do.
Mod parent up!
For those of you who still actually see ads, I highly recommend these extensions. I see about one ad a week, usually on some really small regional website that has their own ad system. Think about it - how many ads does the average surfer see in a week?
These extensions will have almost as much of an impact on your browsing as switching to Firefox did in the first place. I've simply installed them both then hidden all their toolbar icons/messages/etc. because they simply work. I cannot recommend them enough.
Kudos to their developers.
If I buy a CD, I can stick it in my computer and rip it into iTunes. That's legal, right?
If I buy a DVD, why can't I do the same thing? Rip it into iTunes, put it on my iPod, import it into other programs and play with it, etc.
Is there a fundamental difference between video content and audio content?! Why? Is it just that CDs were invented before DRM? That when CDs were standardized, the technology didn't exist to import and "get at" that audio content - technology that for the media companies "necessitated" DRM?
So, back to the question: Is it legal to import CDs? (I hope so.) Is it legal to import DVD's a la DVD Jon's software? (I assume the media companies would say no.) Why?!
In this brave new world of DRM, the rules are made by what The Companies technologically let you do, rather than what the laws actually decree. I am sure that once CDs go by the wayside, all content (audio, video, commercial software) will be DRM'd and authenticated to "make sure" that you cannot distribute it in any way once it gets to you - no matter what media is used to get it to you. I'm not looking forward to it.
Exactly.
While automation in itself is a good idea, one must remember that a computer has no inherent moral standards: if someone (with sufficient "authority") tells it that it IS supposed to land in a building, it won't argue.
DARPA's automated cars/tanks would have the same problem. Aside from incapacitating jamming, DoS, etc., couldn't some script kiddies in "generic enemy country" take over one of these? A soldier who is told to do something blatantly against his country would probably refuse, or at least ask for confirmation. A robot, on the other hand, would still think it was doing the right thing.
Of course, some people will already be thinking of the political/military ramifications of having the only moon base. Sad, indeed... why does world domination always outweigh global scientific co-operation? (Like the ISS, for example, which Bush just decided to opt out of!)
I can imagine someone doing this... maybe even disguising it using Microsoft headers, etc... Or maybe an ANTIvirus company, who sends it to their users, or maybe to everyone for "convenience", while only their users (with 'foobar_antivirusprogram.exe' installed) can actually run it. Any thoughts?
How do you use wind power on a car? Wind turbines wouldn't work, maybe a sail?
Re:Are Competitors Building Dead-End Technology?
on
X Prize Race Heats Up
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Actually, I read in a PopSci article (right here) that Rutan does have plans for the SpaceShipOne/WhiteKnight, but that he wants others to build and commercialize them:
Rutan's historical model is Wilbur Wright's tour of France in 1908, which sparked tremendous growth in the industry. Rutan wants SpaceShipOne to kick-start a similar burst of innovation. Hence his ambitious post-X-Prize testing and demonstration plan: Fly every Tuesday for five months, 20 flights in a row on schedule, to determine the system's cost and reliability. Though he envisions everything from 10- passenger suborbital tour buses to a giant White Knight that uses eight 747 engines to launch a 300-ton spacecraft, Rutan says those are for others to build: "The Wrights didn't build the world's first airliner--they didn't need to," he says. "I hope people don't expect me to certificate a spaceship and offer rides. I want to be doing something more exciting by then."
From the article: Most people are confused and flummoxed by the jargon used to describe new technology, says a survey.
Well, I know the definition of mp3, and html, and bluetooth, and DVR, and hertz, megahertz, gigahertz [...] and I scored 100% on this test, but what does "flummoxed" mean?!
Next on Slashdot: Nerds confused by media lingo!
Okay, here it is:
a : to make indistinct : BLUR b : to mix indiscriminately : JUMBLE c : to fail to differentiate from an often similar or related other
When I first read your post, I thought, hmmm.... that's a good idea for right-handed people (and left-handed people like me who use their right hand to move the mouse.) After all, most desktops/workstations/notLaptopsOrPDAs have the mouse on the right. But then I looked at the picture and saw that it was on the left. I did a quick Google Image Search for Toshiba laptops and noticed that they've had some like that for a while. (Check out this old one.) On the Toshiba website, most of their laptops have the mouse pad slightly to the left. It could be a hardware issue (something in the way under the hood), or maybe just the preference of their (slightly illogical) boss? Their site doesn't help...
Whoops, sorry. They were talking about http://science.slashdot.org/. I guess it doesn't get updated quite as often. Nevertheless, go Slashdot!
For those who don't get PopSci, *gasp*, their next four are, in order
o scienceblog.com
o impactlab.com
o techdirt.com
o mygeekdom.com, which they refer to as "Slashdot with a potty mouth."
What about the rest of you slashdotters? What are your favourites?
From the article: Call it a guilty pleasure. You're not necessarily attracted to it, but you can't resist it's charm. Constantly updated with info from dark corners of the web you wouldn't otherwise visit, Slashdot is still the most recognized and informed science-related blog on the net. Intelligent [Ha!...just kidding!] musings ramble from general science to space to biotech. Recommended dose: twice a day.
Three cheers for Slashdot!
(It's on page 98 of the July edition, if you're looking for it.
I'm glad to see China and Russia get over their differences in a productive, co-operative venture such as this. The world needs to work together as a whole. Remember, we're all the same species!:-)
I know it's offtopic, but I'm feeling philosophical this afternoon...
Why don't artists skip the labels? Go straight to the Apple Music Store or mp3.com or whatever? With that extra thirty cents a song, they don't need support from Universal or Sony or whoever.
Slashdot Mirror
It's kind of interesting how much effort has gone in to building a robot that can drive in (error-prone) human traffic. If, on the other hand, *every* car was automated, it would be so much easier to implement. (Controls built into the road, maybe, and of course less need to handle wildly out-of-control cars; plus benefits like optimized freeways (anyone remember "Blue Thunder"'s freeway?) and intelligent intersections that talk to incoming cars, etc.) I think the eventual progression is to automated and efficient public transportation, where no one owns their own car, nor needs to. Did anybody consider, back in the day, if one car per person/family was actually a good idea?
How far this technology has come in just a few years is (ridiculously) amazing. Major kudos to everyone who's brought this so far!
I only wish that one of the conditions of winning was to release the software that powered your car - can you imagine how much farther things would have come if everyone could build on the previous years' winners? So much brilliant coding has gone into this, but so much of it is just reinventing the wheel. (...Ouch.) But in all honesty, the state of the art would progress gigantically if one of the winners would GPL their car-driving software.
Why is that so obvious to us, but not to SOCAN or the copyright board people?
Does anyone have a clue how this is supposed to be a good idea? The only thing I can possibly think of is that a) the fee will hurt independent sellers more than CRIA aligned sellers (conspiracy), b) it's designed to be absurd to help kill the levy which the CRIA dislikes(conspiracy), or c) the story as reported by MacNN is inaccurate since I've never heard of them and was too lazy to look through the 65 page pdf(conspiracy or stupidity). The story on MacNN seems genuine, at least compared to what I read yesterday; it seems like the CRIA aren't the bad guys for once (although I'm guessing they also support the CD tax); it sounds to me like SOCAN just wants as much money as it can get its hands on.
I too don't have any clue how this is supposed to be a good idea.
It would be comparable, I guess, to SOCAN collecting a tax on CD purchases. The whole beauty of internet distribution is getting rid of (or reducing the number of) middlemen. This is destroying every incentive people have to *support the artist*, which seems completely against what the whole point of SOCAN was. So if I make a band and sell my music using paypal, do I have to write cheques giving 3% of my profits to SOCAN? What am I getting from them? How does this help the artists? How does this help the industry? *
Down with middlemen.
* "While no public responses have been made, the Copyright Board report notes that both Apple and the RIAA-equivalent Canadian Recording Industry Association were heavily involved in resisting proposed rates."
So even the CRIA's against it. Who the heck is SOCAN representing?
Just a few corrections to the article:
:-)
The youtube link is to the U of S's winning round last year; it's now the third annual space elevator competition. The rest of the article is correct. It's worth noting that the height and speed requirements are double what they were last year.
Hopefully the weather will be better tomorrow and the competitions will continue! All the best to all the teams... and especially the USST, of course.
Keep in mind that milliseconds are a human invention; if the signal was an extra-terrestrial message, the fact that it lined up with human time measurements would be a coincidence (and an unlikely one at that). This sounds more like a "human creation" - ie, either of the two possibilities that NeutronCowboy mentioned.
...(i'm still on dial-up)... Several months ago I was actually asked to set up dial-up for a local company (I was floored... it's really quite unthinkable where I live.) But the manager of the place had been enjoying dial-up on his (still running) 1994 ThinkPad for years, so I got them set up with the pay-per-use dialup option. It gives dog slow a new meaning. But it costs them 3 dollars a month! Whatever works, I guess...Although, they make up for it with "account expiry" times lasting a month. I'm using their Pay-As-You-Go; I normally spend about $5/month. However, if I don't "top up" (stupid buzzwords!) my account every month, I'll lose the current account balance. It wouldn't be a problem if they let you pay in increments less than *fifteen* dollars at a time! After using the phone since Christmas, I have about $80 in my account, and if I don't keep on paying $15/month I'll lose that. Consider it already gone.
Sorry to rant. It's just really annoying that no cell company anywhere will charge as low as they say they do.
Mod parent up! For those of you who still actually see ads, I highly recommend these extensions. I see about one ad a week, usually on some really small regional website that has their own ad system. Think about it - how many ads does the average surfer see in a week? These extensions will have almost as much of an impact on your browsing as switching to Firefox did in the first place. I've simply installed them both then hidden all their toolbar icons/messages/etc. because they simply work. I cannot recommend them enough. Kudos to their developers.
Sorry if this is offtopic.
If I buy a CD, I can stick it in my computer and rip it into iTunes. That's legal, right?
If I buy a DVD, why can't I do the same thing? Rip it into iTunes, put it on my iPod, import it into other programs and play with it, etc.
Is there a fundamental difference between video content and audio content?! Why? Is it just that CDs were invented before DRM? That when CDs were standardized, the technology didn't exist to import and "get at" that audio content - technology that for the media companies "necessitated" DRM?
So, back to the question: Is it legal to import CDs? (I hope so.) Is it legal to import DVD's a la DVD Jon's software? (I assume the media companies would say no.) Why?!
In this brave new world of DRM, the rules are made by what The Companies technologically let you do, rather than what the laws actually decree. I am sure that once CDs go by the wayside, all content (audio, video, commercial software) will be DRM'd and authenticated to "make sure" that you cannot distribute it in any way once it gets to you - no matter what media is used to get it to you. I'm not looking forward to it.
Exactly. While automation in itself is a good idea, one must remember that a computer has no inherent moral standards: if someone (with sufficient "authority") tells it that it IS supposed to land in a building, it won't argue. DARPA's automated cars/tanks would have the same problem. Aside from incapacitating jamming, DoS, etc., couldn't some script kiddies in "generic enemy country" take over one of these? A soldier who is told to do something blatantly against his country would probably refuse, or at least ask for confirmation. A robot, on the other hand, would still think it was doing the right thing.
Of course, some people will already be thinking of the political/military ramifications of having the only moon base. Sad, indeed... why does world domination always outweigh global scientific co-operation? (Like the ISS, for example, which Bush just decided to opt out of!)
I can imagine someone doing this... maybe even disguising it using Microsoft headers, etc... Or maybe an ANTIvirus company, who sends it to their users, or maybe to everyone for "convenience", while only their users (with 'foobar_antivirusprogram.exe' installed) can actually run it. Any thoughts?
All I can say is:
Amen.
How do you use wind power on a car? Wind turbines wouldn't work, maybe a sail?
Actually, I read in a PopSci article (right here) that Rutan does have plans for the SpaceShipOne/WhiteKnight, but that he wants others to build and commercialize them:
Rutan's historical model is Wilbur Wright's tour of France in 1908, which sparked tremendous growth in the industry. Rutan wants SpaceShipOne to kick-start a similar burst of innovation. Hence his ambitious post-X-Prize testing and demonstration plan: Fly every Tuesday for five months, 20 flights in a row on schedule, to determine the system's cost and reliability. Though he envisions everything from 10- passenger suborbital tour buses to a giant White Knight that uses eight 747 engines to launch a 300-ton spacecraft, Rutan says those are for others to build: "The Wrights didn't build the world's first airliner--they didn't need to," he says. "I hope people don't expect me to certificate a spaceship and offer rides. I want to be doing something more exciting by then."
Go, Burt!
Oops, sorry!
Didn't mean to be redundant, but someone else posted something like this a bit up the page while I was typing it.
From the article: Most people are confused and flummoxed by the jargon used to describe new technology, says a survey.
Well, I know the definition of mp3, and html, and bluetooth, and DVR, and hertz, megahertz, gigahertz [...] and I scored 100% on this test, but what does "flummoxed" mean?!
Next on Slashdot: Nerds confused by media lingo!
Okay, here it is:
a : to make indistinct : BLUR b : to mix indiscriminately : JUMBLE c : to fail to differentiate from an often similar or related other
It's the same as 'confuse'.
When I first read your post, I thought, hmmm.... that's a good idea for right-handed people (and left-handed people like me who use their right hand to move the mouse.) After all, most desktops/workstations/notLaptopsOrPDAs have the mouse on the right. But then I looked at the picture and saw that it was on the left. I did a quick Google Image Search for Toshiba laptops and noticed that they've had some like that for a while. (Check out this old one.) On the Toshiba website, most of their laptops have the mouse pad slightly to the left. It could be a hardware issue (something in the way under the hood), or maybe just the preference of their (slightly illogical) boss? Their site doesn't help...
Whoops, sorry. They were talking about http://science.slashdot.org/. I guess it doesn't get updated quite as often. Nevertheless, go Slashdot!
For those who don't get PopSci, *gasp*, their next four are, in order
o scienceblog.com
o impactlab.com
o techdirt.com
o mygeekdom.com, which they refer to as "Slashdot with a potty mouth."
What about the rest of you slashdotters? What are your favourites?
Slashdot!
...just kidding!] musings ramble from general science to space to biotech. Recommended dose: twice a day.
From the article:
Call it a guilty pleasure. You're not necessarily attracted to it, but you can't resist it's charm. Constantly updated with info from dark corners of the web you wouldn't otherwise visit, Slashdot is still the most recognized and informed science-related blog on the net. Intelligent [Ha!
Three cheers for Slashdot!
(It's on page 98 of the July edition, if you're looking for it.
I'm glad to see China and Russia get over their differences in a productive, co-operative venture such as this. The world needs to work together as a whole. Remember, we're all the same species! :-)
I know it's offtopic, but I'm feeling philosophical this afternoon...
I don't think anybody would read this since I posted it so late, but anyways...
:-)
I just read the title and skipped to the next story (business and politics don't interest me much) but then I suddenly went back and read it again:
Bill Would Let FBI Police File-Sharing
I was shocked and horrified that he had the authority to decide that until I realized you weren't talking about Bill Gates!
Why don't artists skip the labels? Go straight to the Apple Music Store or mp3.com or whatever? With that extra thirty cents a song, they don't need support from Universal or Sony or whoever.
Of course, the hard part is getting started...