Hrm. I just had an interesting thought which applies here but I'm sure folks have covered already. Somewhere.
So, you can copyright source code, no problem. I know there is a bit of confusion about the meaning of the term "derivative work" and here's an example.
Let's say I have a trivial program, say, "Hello World" or something like that. What exactly is the copyrighted bit here? Is it the source - that is, the exact language representation used - say, C++ or Pascal or Assembly? Or is it the instructions generated by that source? How many different source code versions of "hello world" can compile into the same executable? Does that mean they are all the same source code or not?
The reason I'm not sure it's the "instructions generated by that source" is because that means that the copyright can extend to things that do not yet exist. Let's say I have a copyrighted bit of code. Then let's say that some guy comes along 3 years later and writes, for a brand-new architecture that didn't exist when I obtained my copyright, in a different language, some library that performs the functionality of my code and compiles it. Now let's say someone compiles my code on the new machine and the compiled version of my library is the same as the "independently developed" code (which is possible in certain cases).
So here's the question - did the guy developing for the new architecture violate my original copyright or not?
I honestly don't know how to answer that question.
It's quite important, because if you can only copyright source code and not the binaries - then that is an interesting situation. If the copyright really applies to the compiled binaries that's another interesting situation. It seems, however, that the current take is that it applies to both things simultaneously.
Another odd situation - what happens if I reverse-compile a copyrighted program and then distribute the reverse compilation. I generated a new, different work than the original source code and a different "work" than the compiled binary. Or did I? Is that different than me going to a museum and sketching The Scream? So did I violate a copyright there? Another tough question.
The only conclusion I can make at this point is that the artificial constructs of copyright need some work. I wish I had an answer that would make everyone happy though (the only one I can come up with is a semi-popular one: that intellectual property, not being an economically scarce good, should not enjoy the status of "property" at all. For those curious, I think the things that are economically scarce are the ability to generate new information, the ability to transfer information, and the abilities to interpret and use information. I think those are the things on which our economy should be based, not the information itself.)
You don't really `need' an OS (assuming they figure out ways of enabling you to efficiently use the hardware from VM)
Hrm. It seems to me that if you're running on a VM instead of an "Operating System" then your VM is your operating system. At least, the traditional definition of "Operating System" is "the bit of software that goes between the applications and the hardware as an abstraction layer." The only things I've seen that don't need "operating systems" are embedded applications which are the only thing running on the hardware ever.
Putting a VM between applications and hardware is the same thing as an operating system in my book; it just seems like the concept Application->OS->VM->Hardware is an added layer of abstraction and complexity. (If the "OS" was done right, it would have the necessary separation between applications, etc. that the VM provides without the complexity of the concepts currently involved with VMs).
An interesting but little known fact is that the C standards specify that all implementations of C(++) are to treat a constant 0 in code as the null pointer, even if the null pointer is not actually implemented as a binary zero.
That's why you don't really need if (ptr == NULL); you really can just do if (ptr) or if (!ptr) and it should work.
The "should" is only because having a correct compiler isn't as likely as you might think. You *do* check your compilers for behavior before you use them, right?
Why not just disallow anyone not capable of not programming a buffer overflow from ever programming a device? It's not a language issue. I'm sure that unqualified folks will figure out how to cause all sorts of new vulnerabilities in "safe" languages. (Hint: there is no such thing as a "safe" language.)
I guess maybe I'm just in the "old school" camp that thinks that unqualified people shouldn't be allowed to do things. There's a reason why, for instance, amateur carpenters aren't allowed to construct public buildings.
Maybe we should actually require people to be licensed programmers...while that would weed out some of the problem, though, we all know that professional engineering licenses or whatever don't guarantee competence...
There are also other CFR items to which things are subject. The order even says
Section 1. (a) Except to the extent provided in section 203(b)(1), (3), and (4) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(1), (3), and (4)),....
Well, I admit I didn't look those up to see what limits those are, but those must be limitations on what the SecTreas and SecDef can deem in this case - there are still limits there, just "not obvious" ones.
$100 service that other companies largely provide for free.
Well, it's free to the end user, but that hosting isn't free. Instead of paying directly, those "free" services are typically supported by advertisements or some other form of indirect revenue.
While I admit that I abuse some free services (because, in having a positive savings rate of higher than 10% I don't support the advertisement machine as much as the average), I don't have a problem with companies that *gasp* charge for the services they provide directly to those using the service.
It's arguably more honest than being a sort of agent for the folks buying the advertisements: Hey, pay us some money, and we'll get all these people to look at you!
Scene graphs do sound a little off the wall to me, based on the description in the review.
When I think about 3D rendering, I think about modeling things as physical objects, with their shape, location, and orientation. Now, I can see the action of "rotate the object" or "place the object" being a function, but I really don't understand the concept of putting verb information in an object (which I consider to be a noun).
It seriously makes my head hurt to think that in order to draw an object X at location Y and orientation N, I have to create an object X, create an object "Offset", create an object "Rotation", then link them all together. Nounifying verbs is equally troubling as verbifying nouns in this case. Just have the object X extend from PlaceableEntity with the interface setPosition and OrientableEntity with the interface setOrientation.
No goofy objects, just X.setPosition(x,y,z); X.setOrientation(xaxis,yaxis). Then you have a scene like Scene.drawObject(X) and you're all done.
(Is my understanding of draw graph wrong? I would hate to do Scene.addObject(X); Scene.addRotation(R), Scene.addTranslation(P); or some nonsense like that).
It's hard to say. Using a generous $1M = 10 man-years of effort (at about $100/man-year) this means you would spend that much money on only 190 man-years. The question is, how many man-years to design, prototype, test, and build a production version of this?
190 man-years seems like a lot to me though. It gets worse if you use "world average" cost of a man year, which is closer to $20k instead of $100k.
Converting everything to man-years isn't always the best way to look at costs, but it is a handy back-of-the-envelope method to do a sanity check on big-ticket items. The difficulty comes in because sometimes the "years" in "man-years" isn't just the years worked, but also the years of "pay without work" to cover things like low-demand services. For instance, if I want to make a living building space toilets, but the market is only for one space toilet every 5 years, then one space toilet has to cover 5 years' worth of my living. And if I'm the expert or whatever in space toilet development, people won't mind paying my living for 5 years with only one sale, because that will help ensure that I'll be able to make that additional space toilet 5 years later instead of being unavailable because I have to work at Big Box Retailer Number Seven because I didn't have enough income to stay in the space toilet market.
Remember, space toilets aren't something they make using mass production in the lowest-priced labor market.
Hrm. It seems to me that, based on what you said, that algorithims are a type of process expression. I think the author of TFA is saying that's too limiting because it only gives a single method to solve a problem. Yeah, that sounds annoying, but it's great for provability: if there is only a single way, you can prove that it will or will not give the desired result.
I'd also contest his argument that operating systems are not deterministic - they are, just with a huge amount of state information; I think the trick is they are deterministic between changes in input state. You don't complain that a car's behavior is "not deterministic" because you don't know the way a driver will turn the steering wheel at any given time; you know that, given a steering wheel input, the response of the car will be X and can then predict the vehicle behavior until the next input from either the driver or another vehicle or a wall or the road or whatever.
In other words, I think the article is about just making sure that we can think about things in different ways. But to say that it's not based on math - I don't know. Can it be done without math? Probably, just as cooking is most often done without even a cursory knowledge of atomic chemistry (you could probably argue that cooking is its own branch of chemistry).
So, I think it's a lot of noise about stuff that people already know and already practice but for which there just isn't a label.
Yup, it's all usage cycles. I think education goes a long way.
Case in point: I have a cell phone from spring of 2001. (Yeah, I haven't upgraded yet, yadda yadda.) I use it as my primary phone - which means it's on pretty much every day, except when I'm camping or something (which isn't that often).
I'm still on the original battery. Yes, that's right - both the phone and the battery have lasted over 6 years now.
So, I don't know if I just got lucky or what, but it seems to me that my usage cycle is such that Batteries Like It.
So, if you have a battery management system that is able to emulate my usage cycle, my guess is a single battery could easily last the ninety-fifth percentile lifespan of phones (I'd say with a 6 year old cellphone, I'm probably in the 98th or higher).
Ehh....that was a bit reactionary. I wasn't actually being serious there, just saying that people in general are trying to shirk responsibility.
That said, if you could really figure out how to charge yourself related to the overall impact of the quantity of fuel you use, that'd be great. The problem is, you have direct fuel consumption cost as well as the side effects: the price of *my* gas depends not only *my* consumption, but also on *everyone else's*.
The problem is the price of gasoline is linear while the cost of using lots of it isn't; the only way to fix this would be to charge people increasing amounts per gallon the more gallons they use per month, but there's no way I'd ever advocate any method of implementing such a scheme. (Something like $2/gal for the first 10 gals/month, $2.20 for gallons 11-20, $2.50 for gallons 21-30, etc. But I'm not going to want the privacy issues related to tracking that sort of thing, and I have no idea how you'd even pick the price levels. The current market does a good enough job.)
By the way, I think you've missed the mark by a large margin on my political views;)
Eh, forget changes due to volume. Changes in energy content due to formulation are even worse!
Pure Ethanol, for instance, only has about 75% the energy of gasoline by mass; I can't remember if ethanol is more or less dense than gasoline (and I'm just going off memory here), but use of ethanol is worse for mileage than any volume change you might have.
I don't know the effects of other things - various detergents and all that sort of stuff, but my guess is it has more effect than whatever temperature variations are present.
Heck, traffic has more effect than temperature variation! But do you see the public suing the traffic planners and road maintenance crews? Not so much at the moment, but that's where the consumption problems really lie.
Well, that, and the fact that people are driving generally high-drag vehicles with large engines (so with closed throttle and therefore inefficient) at relatively high highway speeds. My guess is going 80mph instead of the 70mph speed limit costs more than 10% in fuel efficiency for those large vehicles (it does in my small vehicle, though going from 36mpg to 32mpg isn't nearly as annoying as going from 17mpg to 15mpg).
I'd like to start a lawsuit against the highway patrol for not enforcing the speed limit - my guess is you'd save probably a million gallons of gasoline a day (if not more) just by enforcing speed limits.
But, hey, as we all know, when it comes to sensible economic and environmental behavior, logic does not apply.
Yeah, I don't really see this as "swarm intelligence" so much as a system with self optimizing behavior.
Take the example of the gas producer / distributor. They have a system of equations linking variables (the routes that trucks can take, cost to operate the trucks, and price of the product at various plants) which is solved for an optimal solution. The optimization is simply to find the maximum profit - it's a very simple optimization problem. (For mathematical definitions of "simple".) The fact that it's not intuitive doesn't really mean anything other than intuition isn't a good method for optimizing systems.
The interesting thing is that the biological system of an ant hive developed to be an "optimization solver" - which isn't really that surprising considering the whole point of a biological system is to minimize some potential (as happens with all physical systems). It just so happens that with biological systems, minimizing that potential also increases the probability of the system existing for longer periods of time (in other words, perpetuating the species). I think ant hive behavior is kind of anthropic - if hives were not optimized that way, ant hives wouldn't exist because all the ants would be dead.
So, yes, this is nifty stuff, but I don't see it as "intelligence" so much as an optimization problem.
Of course, it may be the case that "intelligence" is the result of an optimization, but it may also be the case that "intelligence" falls into "Godel space" (i.e. that space where something exists but can't be proven because logic, being sufficiently powerful, is incomplete).
I still like how people think that C is a platform-dependent language.
I write stuff in C/C++ using OpenGL and it compiles and runs consistently on Windows, OSX, and Linux. I don't need any interpreters (Python) or fancy toolkits or anything.
Platform independence is not a language issue, it's a library / API issue. If you use Win32 or.Net, you're stuck Windows (excepting Mono). If you use Cocoa, MacOSX. I suppose the equivalent on Linux would be glibc or one of the GUI toolkits. You could probably even classify Python as an API if you looked at it in a certain way.
The standard C library is probably about as standard an API as you'll get, along with Python, Java, etc. Now, yes, I realize that some implementations are a bit goofy (or just plain wrong), but if you stick with the functions that have been around for 30 years, it's hard to be bitten.
(Note: Also, stop using undefined features of languages, like "i = i++;"!)
I think the big catch here is what is "derivative work."
For instance, if I distribute a new operating system that is proprietary but I include with it a GPL application, does that make the whole operating system fall under the GPL? I surely hope not!
So, if the "proprietary" bits of the iPhone are all in the operating system, and they happen to have GPL bits in the Safari-based browser (or whatever), I don't think the entire iPhone code-base is "derivative" to whatever the GPL has.
In fact, I'm pretty certain that there's not even anything in any version of the GPL that says "if you have a GPL app on a system, then you have to allow people to install or modify or remove anything on that system, including that GPL app".
Another dumb example: I have a microwave that happens to use GPL timer code for the clock. Does that mean the entire microwave controller software is derivative of the GPL bits?
Personally, I think a rigorous, sensible, objective definition of "derivative work" needs to be established to get rid of all these emotional debates. In my mind, "derivative work" would be something along the lines of "it's based on something so much that you can't replace it with another implementation."
That is, if a piece of code uses a GPL clock, it's not a derivative if any old clock will work given the correct interface tweaks. Basically the old "if you use it as a plug-in infrastructure nuts-and-bolts thing, it's not a derivative work." However, something like a file system or nifty prioritization library might not be replaceable - that is, the functionality of the overall system depends on the explicit functionality of a bit of code - now *that* is a derivative work. Anyway, those aren't intended to be rigorous or objective, just some probably circumstantial examples...
Music distribution and marketing services: Not so much any more.
The latter is what scares the labels so much. They're not dumb; they know that in a battle between artists and distribution, distribution loses in the modern age because, while artists are scarce, distributors are not.
The music distribution industry is, to borrow a cliché, already dead; it just hasn't stopped breathing yet.
What I want to know is why the big models don't show "small" atmospheric features like hurricanes and thunderstorms? Those are massive energy dissipation systems that surely have an important impact. However, even hurricanes are features that are "too small" to be resolved by most of the global climate models - the smallest cell size I've seen is about 150km on a side. Usually hurricanes and storms are only modeled on the local level, based on the fact that the systems already exist; we still can't predict if we'll get a hurricane - we can only predict (with some fairly large margin of error) the path of an already existing storm.
I find it telling that a single hurricane dissipates (transfers from the ocean surface to the upper atmosphere) about as much energy in its track as a small country does in the course of a year...
Magnetos aren't as reliable as you think they are. Why do you think there are two of them?;)
Detonation is really the key driver for 100LL, and while electronic ignition can help (by adjusting timing) you'd sacrifice engine power to prevent detonation - same thing that happens in autos when the ignition is retarded and just the nature of current piston engines - there's a direct (and potentially significant) trade-off between timing and power/fuel economy.
The big reason for detonation in small aircraft engines is cylinder geometry - very high displacements with low engine speed (e.g., large piston area) is a prime contributor to detonation. Most "high compression" aircraft engines only have a compression ratio of around 8:1, which is not "high" at all - yet they are still quite susceptible to detonation. Sometimes this is due to high air-charge temperatures due to turbo charging. It's also related to the fact that most of these engines are air-cooled, which means much higher cylinder temperatures than automotive applications (typical "do not exceed" temperatures are 450 to 500 degrees F - the liquid cooling in automobiles keeps heads down in the 250 degF range.)
Wow, I must have been asleep all morning - none of my math is correct (I said 'gallons' instead of 'kilograms', etc.)! Also, some other folks already did this same analysis.
Eh, only problem is that the surface area of a car is maybe 1 square meter. Even at 50% conversion for the whole system you might get about 350-450 W. Over 8 hours, that's not even 4 kW-hr.
To put that in perspective, a gallon of gasoline has about 11.6 kW-hr energy. So, hope that charge is only needed for about a 1/3 gallon equivalent - in my car, which gets 30 mpg, that's only 10 miles (on an energy-equivalent basis). For a car that gets 50mpge, that 4 kW-hr would still only go 16 miles. Not very far unless you have a nice short commute.
That last number shows that you'd probably be better off giving incentives for people to live closer to work than to try and come up with some sort of new technology; for instance, I'm planning on moving so my 60-mile-a-day commute drops down to something like a 20-miles-a-day commute; that will do more good for the environment in terms of energy/emissions than any new technology could - that's probably a 50% decrease (not the full 67% because I'll get worse fuel economy over the shorter, non-highway commute).
Exactly, but that's probably why nobody will ever implement proportional representation.
Yeah, I know that's cynical...
The other thing that would "fix" the system is keep authority within appropriate geographic extents; for instance, what is good for people and what people in California want is generally not the same as those in South Carolina - the only things that should be Federal are those that apply equally to everyone, and a lot of the current legislative system on the Federal lever has gone well beyond those boundaries.
It's not just the US, either; the EU has the same problem...
Um... value doesn't work that way. "Value" is not a fixed quantity that gets divided up among all the instances of an item. Value is really the subjective trade-off between a thing and the things given up to have that thing, and doesn't matter how many people have that thing.
The reason price tends to drop for an increased supply and increased demand is that the creator can increase revenue by dropping the per-unit price but, overall, the income increases.
The thing that the content industry needs to realize is that people are no longer paying for copies of content like we had to do before it was easy to make copies; now people are only willing to pay for the efforts of the content creators.
That subtle difference is the important thing - copies are not what has value, the merit of the content is what has the value. Tying payment to the distribution used to work fine, but that just isn't going to work any more, and instead of trying to come up with an appropriate solution, the current industry is trying to litigate instead, which actually increases the costs for everyone involved rather than reducing them.
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Hrm. I just had an interesting thought which applies here but I'm sure folks have covered already. Somewhere.
So, you can copyright source code, no problem. I know there is a bit of confusion about the meaning of the term "derivative work" and here's an example.
Let's say I have a trivial program, say, "Hello World" or something like that. What exactly is the copyrighted bit here? Is it the source - that is, the exact language representation used - say, C++ or Pascal or Assembly? Or is it the instructions generated by that source? How many different source code versions of "hello world" can compile into the same executable? Does that mean they are all the same source code or not?
The reason I'm not sure it's the "instructions generated by that source" is because that means that the copyright can extend to things that do not yet exist. Let's say I have a copyrighted bit of code. Then let's say that some guy comes along 3 years later and writes, for a brand-new architecture that didn't exist when I obtained my copyright, in a different language, some library that performs the functionality of my code and compiles it. Now let's say someone compiles my code on the new machine and the compiled version of my library is the same as the "independently developed" code (which is possible in certain cases).
So here's the question - did the guy developing for the new architecture violate my original copyright or not?
I honestly don't know how to answer that question.
It's quite important, because if you can only copyright source code and not the binaries - then that is an interesting situation. If the copyright really applies to the compiled binaries that's another interesting situation. It seems, however, that the current take is that it applies to both things simultaneously.
Another odd situation - what happens if I reverse-compile a copyrighted program and then distribute the reverse compilation. I generated a new, different work than the original source code and a different "work" than the compiled binary. Or did I? Is that different than me going to a museum and sketching The Scream? So did I violate a copyright there? Another tough question.
The only conclusion I can make at this point is that the artificial constructs of copyright need some work. I wish I had an answer that would make everyone happy though (the only one I can come up with is a semi-popular one: that intellectual property, not being an economically scarce good, should not enjoy the status of "property" at all. For those curious, I think the things that are economically scarce are the ability to generate new information, the ability to transfer information, and the abilities to interpret and use information. I think those are the things on which our economy should be based, not the information itself.)
Oh, wow... I used to burn so many hours in college on that one.
The taunts...oh, the taunts!
(And don't forget dynamite!)
Hrm. It seems to me that if you're running on a VM instead of an "Operating System" then your VM is your operating system. At least, the traditional definition of "Operating System" is "the bit of software that goes between the applications and the hardware as an abstraction layer." The only things I've seen that don't need "operating systems" are embedded applications which are the only thing running on the hardware ever.
Putting a VM between applications and hardware is the same thing as an operating system in my book; it just seems like the concept Application->OS->VM->Hardware is an added layer of abstraction and complexity. (If the "OS" was done right, it would have the necessary separation between applications, etc. that the VM provides without the complexity of the concepts currently involved with VMs).
An interesting but little known fact is that the C standards specify that all implementations of C(++) are to treat a constant 0 in code as the null pointer, even if the null pointer is not actually implemented as a binary zero.
That's why you don't really need if (ptr == NULL); you really can just do if (ptr) or if (!ptr) and it should work.
The "should" is only because having a correct compiler isn't as likely as you might think. You *do* check your compilers for behavior before you use them, right?
*sigh* I hate this argument.
Why not just disallow anyone not capable of not programming a buffer overflow from ever programming a device? It's not a language issue. I'm sure that unqualified folks will figure out how to cause all sorts of new vulnerabilities in "safe" languages. (Hint: there is no such thing as a "safe" language.)
I guess maybe I'm just in the "old school" camp that thinks that unqualified people shouldn't be allowed to do things. There's a reason why, for instance, amateur carpenters aren't allowed to construct public buildings.
Maybe we should actually require people to be licensed programmers...while that would weed out some of the problem, though, we all know that professional engineering licenses or whatever don't guarantee competence...
</rant>
There are also other CFR items to which things are subject. The order even says
Well, I admit I didn't look those up to see what limits those are, but those must be limitations on what the SecTreas and SecDef can deem in this case - there are still limits there, just "not obvious" ones.
Well, it's free to the end user, but that hosting isn't free. Instead of paying directly, those "free" services are typically supported by advertisements or some other form of indirect revenue.
While I admit that I abuse some free services (because, in having a positive savings rate of higher than 10% I don't support the advertisement machine as much as the average), I don't have a problem with companies that *gasp* charge for the services they provide directly to those using the service.
It's arguably more honest than being a sort of agent for the folks buying the advertisements: Hey, pay us some money, and we'll get all these people to look at you!
Scene graphs do sound a little off the wall to me, based on the description in the review.
When I think about 3D rendering, I think about modeling things as physical objects, with their shape, location, and orientation. Now, I can see the action of "rotate the object" or "place the object" being a function, but I really don't understand the concept of putting verb information in an object (which I consider to be a noun).
It seriously makes my head hurt to think that in order to draw an object X at location Y and orientation N, I have to create an object X, create an object "Offset", create an object "Rotation", then link them all together. Nounifying verbs is equally troubling as verbifying nouns in this case. Just have the object X extend from PlaceableEntity with the interface setPosition and OrientableEntity with the interface setOrientation.
No goofy objects, just X.setPosition(x,y,z); X.setOrientation(xaxis,yaxis). Then you have a scene like Scene.drawObject(X) and you're all done.
(Is my understanding of draw graph wrong? I would hate to do Scene.addObject(X); Scene.addRotation(R), Scene.addTranslation(P); or some nonsense like that).
It's hard to say. Using a generous $1M = 10 man-years of effort (at about $100/man-year) this means you would spend that much money on only 190 man-years. The question is, how many man-years to design, prototype, test, and build a production version of this?
190 man-years seems like a lot to me though. It gets worse if you use "world average" cost of a man year, which is closer to $20k instead of $100k.
Converting everything to man-years isn't always the best way to look at costs, but it is a handy back-of-the-envelope method to do a sanity check on big-ticket items. The difficulty comes in because sometimes the "years" in "man-years" isn't just the years worked, but also the years of "pay without work" to cover things like low-demand services. For instance, if I want to make a living building space toilets, but the market is only for one space toilet every 5 years, then one space toilet has to cover 5 years' worth of my living. And if I'm the expert or whatever in space toilet development, people won't mind paying my living for 5 years with only one sale, because that will help ensure that I'll be able to make that additional space toilet 5 years later instead of being unavailable because I have to work at Big Box Retailer Number Seven because I didn't have enough income to stay in the space toilet market.
Remember, space toilets aren't something they make using mass production in the lowest-priced labor market.
Hrm. It seems to me that, based on what you said, that algorithims are a type of process expression. I think the author of TFA is saying that's too limiting because it only gives a single method to solve a problem. Yeah, that sounds annoying, but it's great for provability: if there is only a single way, you can prove that it will or will not give the desired result.
I'd also contest his argument that operating systems are not deterministic - they are, just with a huge amount of state information; I think the trick is they are deterministic between changes in input state. You don't complain that a car's behavior is "not deterministic" because you don't know the way a driver will turn the steering wheel at any given time; you know that, given a steering wheel input, the response of the car will be X and can then predict the vehicle behavior until the next input from either the driver or another vehicle or a wall or the road or whatever.
In other words, I think the article is about just making sure that we can think about things in different ways. But to say that it's not based on math - I don't know. Can it be done without math? Probably, just as cooking is most often done without even a cursory knowledge of atomic chemistry (you could probably argue that cooking is its own branch of chemistry).
So, I think it's a lot of noise about stuff that people already know and already practice but for which there just isn't a label.
Hrm... better be careful there. Some people in South Carolina still wish they had succeeded in getting their own country.
(Normally I don't pick at things like this, but geez do people not even care about the difference between 'Columbia' and 'Colombia'?)
Yup, it's all usage cycles. I think education goes a long way.
Case in point: I have a cell phone from spring of 2001. (Yeah, I haven't upgraded yet, yadda yadda.) I use it as my primary phone - which means it's on pretty much every day, except when I'm camping or something (which isn't that often).
I'm still on the original battery. Yes, that's right - both the phone and the battery have lasted over 6 years now.
So, I don't know if I just got lucky or what, but it seems to me that my usage cycle is such that Batteries Like It.
So, if you have a battery management system that is able to emulate my usage cycle, my guess is a single battery could easily last the ninety-fifth percentile lifespan of phones (I'd say with a 6 year old cellphone, I'm probably in the 98th or higher).
Ehh....that was a bit reactionary. I wasn't actually being serious there, just saying that people in general are trying to shirk responsibility.
That said, if you could really figure out how to charge yourself related to the overall impact of the quantity of fuel you use, that'd be great. The problem is, you have direct fuel consumption cost as well as the side effects: the price of *my* gas depends not only *my* consumption, but also on *everyone else's*.
The problem is the price of gasoline is linear while the cost of using lots of it isn't; the only way to fix this would be to charge people increasing amounts per gallon the more gallons they use per month, but there's no way I'd ever advocate any method of implementing such a scheme. (Something like $2/gal for the first 10 gals/month, $2.20 for gallons 11-20, $2.50 for gallons 21-30, etc. But I'm not going to want the privacy issues related to tracking that sort of thing, and I have no idea how you'd even pick the price levels. The current market does a good enough job.)
By the way, I think you've missed the mark by a large margin on my political views ;)
Eh, forget changes due to volume. Changes in energy content due to formulation are even worse!
Pure Ethanol, for instance, only has about 75% the energy of gasoline by mass; I can't remember if ethanol is more or less dense than gasoline (and I'm just going off memory here), but use of ethanol is worse for mileage than any volume change you might have.
I don't know the effects of other things - various detergents and all that sort of stuff, but my guess is it has more effect than whatever temperature variations are present.
Heck, traffic has more effect than temperature variation! But do you see the public suing the traffic planners and road maintenance crews? Not so much at the moment, but that's where the consumption problems really lie.
Well, that, and the fact that people are driving generally high-drag vehicles with large engines (so with closed throttle and therefore inefficient) at relatively high highway speeds. My guess is going 80mph instead of the 70mph speed limit costs more than 10% in fuel efficiency for those large vehicles (it does in my small vehicle, though going from 36mpg to 32mpg isn't nearly as annoying as going from 17mpg to 15mpg).
I'd like to start a lawsuit against the highway patrol for not enforcing the speed limit - my guess is you'd save probably a million gallons of gasoline a day (if not more) just by enforcing speed limits.
But, hey, as we all know, when it comes to sensible economic and environmental behavior, logic does not apply.
So, instead of just having to work to pump blood, the heart now has to do extra work to power a generator?
Interesting idea, and I wonder what odd side effects that might have...if any. Maybe it would be a new-fangled exercise program!
Yeah, I don't really see this as "swarm intelligence" so much as a system with self optimizing behavior.
Take the example of the gas producer / distributor. They have a system of equations linking variables (the routes that trucks can take, cost to operate the trucks, and price of the product at various plants) which is solved for an optimal solution. The optimization is simply to find the maximum profit - it's a very simple optimization problem. (For mathematical definitions of "simple".) The fact that it's not intuitive doesn't really mean anything other than intuition isn't a good method for optimizing systems.
The interesting thing is that the biological system of an ant hive developed to be an "optimization solver" - which isn't really that surprising considering the whole point of a biological system is to minimize some potential (as happens with all physical systems). It just so happens that with biological systems, minimizing that potential also increases the probability of the system existing for longer periods of time (in other words, perpetuating the species). I think ant hive behavior is kind of anthropic - if hives were not optimized that way, ant hives wouldn't exist because all the ants would be dead.
So, yes, this is nifty stuff, but I don't see it as "intelligence" so much as an optimization problem.
Of course, it may be the case that "intelligence" is the result of an optimization, but it may also be the case that "intelligence" falls into "Godel space" (i.e. that space where something exists but can't be proven because logic, being sufficiently powerful, is incomplete).
I still like how people think that C is a platform-dependent language.
I write stuff in C/C++ using OpenGL and it compiles and runs consistently on Windows, OSX, and Linux. I don't need any interpreters (Python) or fancy toolkits or anything.
Platform independence is not a language issue, it's a library / API issue. If you use Win32 or .Net, you're stuck Windows (excepting Mono). If you use Cocoa, MacOSX. I suppose the equivalent on Linux would be glibc or one of the GUI toolkits. You could probably even classify Python as an API if you looked at it in a certain way.
The standard C library is probably about as standard an API as you'll get, along with Python, Java, etc. Now, yes, I realize that some implementations are a bit goofy (or just plain wrong), but if you stick with the functions that have been around for 30 years, it's hard to be bitten.
(Note: Also, stop using undefined features of languages, like "i = i++;"!)
I think the big catch here is what is "derivative work."
For instance, if I distribute a new operating system that is proprietary but I include with it a GPL application, does that make the whole operating system fall under the GPL? I surely hope not!
So, if the "proprietary" bits of the iPhone are all in the operating system, and they happen to have GPL bits in the Safari-based browser (or whatever), I don't think the entire iPhone code-base is "derivative" to whatever the GPL has.
In fact, I'm pretty certain that there's not even anything in any version of the GPL that says "if you have a GPL app on a system, then you have to allow people to install or modify or remove anything on that system, including that GPL app".
Another dumb example: I have a microwave that happens to use GPL timer code for the clock. Does that mean the entire microwave controller software is derivative of the GPL bits?
Personally, I think a rigorous, sensible, objective definition of "derivative work" needs to be established to get rid of all these emotional debates. In my mind, "derivative work" would be something along the lines of "it's based on something so much that you can't replace it with another implementation."
That is, if a piece of code uses a GPL clock, it's not a derivative if any old clock will work given the correct interface tweaks. Basically the old "if you use it as a plug-in infrastructure nuts-and-bolts thing, it's not a derivative work." However, something like a file system or nifty prioritization library might not be replaceable - that is, the functionality of the overall system depends on the explicit functionality of a bit of code - now *that* is a derivative work. Anyway, those aren't intended to be rigorous or objective, just some probably circumstantial examples...
Depends on the value of what.
Music: valuable.
Music distribution and marketing services: Not so much any more.
The latter is what scares the labels so much. They're not dumb; they know that in a battle between artists and distribution, distribution loses in the modern age because, while artists are scarce, distributors are not.
The music distribution industry is, to borrow a cliché, already dead; it just hasn't stopped breathing yet.
What I want to know is why the big models don't show "small" atmospheric features like hurricanes and thunderstorms? Those are massive energy dissipation systems that surely have an important impact. However, even hurricanes are features that are "too small" to be resolved by most of the global climate models - the smallest cell size I've seen is about 150km on a side. Usually hurricanes and storms are only modeled on the local level, based on the fact that the systems already exist; we still can't predict if we'll get a hurricane - we can only predict (with some fairly large margin of error) the path of an already existing storm.
I find it telling that a single hurricane dissipates (transfers from the ocean surface to the upper atmosphere) about as much energy in its track as a small country does in the course of a year...
Magnetos aren't as reliable as you think they are. Why do you think there are two of them? ;)
Detonation is really the key driver for 100LL, and while electronic ignition can help (by adjusting timing) you'd sacrifice engine power to prevent detonation - same thing that happens in autos when the ignition is retarded and just the nature of current piston engines - there's a direct (and potentially significant) trade-off between timing and power/fuel economy.
The big reason for detonation in small aircraft engines is cylinder geometry - very high displacements with low engine speed (e.g., large piston area) is a prime contributor to detonation. Most "high compression" aircraft engines only have a compression ratio of around 8:1, which is not "high" at all - yet they are still quite susceptible to detonation. Sometimes this is due to high air-charge temperatures due to turbo charging. It's also related to the fact that most of these engines are air-cooled, which means much higher cylinder temperatures than automotive applications (typical "do not exceed" temperatures are 450 to 500 degrees F - the liquid cooling in automobiles keeps heads down in the 250 degF range.)
Wow, I must have been asleep all morning - none of my math is correct (I said 'gallons' instead of 'kilograms', etc.)! Also, some other folks already did this same analysis.
* goes and gets some coffee *
Eh, only problem is that the surface area of a car is maybe 1 square meter. Even at 50% conversion for the whole system you might get about 350-450 W. Over 8 hours, that's not even 4 kW-hr.
To put that in perspective, a gallon of gasoline has about 11.6 kW-hr energy. So, hope that charge is only needed for about a 1/3 gallon equivalent - in my car, which gets 30 mpg, that's only 10 miles (on an energy-equivalent basis). For a car that gets 50mpge, that 4 kW-hr would still only go 16 miles. Not very far unless you have a nice short commute.
That last number shows that you'd probably be better off giving incentives for people to live closer to work than to try and come up with some sort of new technology; for instance, I'm planning on moving so my 60-mile-a-day commute drops down to something like a 20-miles-a-day commute; that will do more good for the environment in terms of energy/emissions than any new technology could - that's probably a 50% decrease (not the full 67% because I'll get worse fuel economy over the shorter, non-highway commute).
Exactly, but that's probably why nobody will ever implement proportional representation.
Yeah, I know that's cynical...
The other thing that would "fix" the system is keep authority within appropriate geographic extents; for instance, what is good for people and what people in California want is generally not the same as those in South Carolina - the only things that should be Federal are those that apply equally to everyone, and a lot of the current legislative system on the Federal lever has gone well beyond those boundaries.
It's not just the US, either; the EU has the same problem...
Um... value doesn't work that way. "Value" is not a fixed quantity that gets divided up among all the instances of an item. Value is really the subjective trade-off between a thing and the things given up to have that thing, and doesn't matter how many people have that thing.
The reason price tends to drop for an increased supply and increased demand is that the creator can increase revenue by dropping the per-unit price but, overall, the income increases.
The thing that the content industry needs to realize is that people are no longer paying for copies of content like we had to do before it was easy to make copies; now people are only willing to pay for the efforts of the content creators.
That subtle difference is the important thing - copies are not what has value, the merit of the content is what has the value. Tying payment to the distribution used to work fine, but that just isn't going to work any more, and instead of trying to come up with an appropriate solution, the current industry is trying to litigate instead, which actually increases the costs for everyone involved rather than reducing them.