In application to the tin-foil hat club, I hereby suggest that Google itself sponsored this contest in order to identify the best techniques for gaming the system.
"Sponsored by IronPort Systems, the Bonded Sender program turns the spam problem upside down by identifying legitimate email traffic. Originators of legitimate email can now post a financial bond to ensure the integrity of their email campaign. Receivers who feel they have received an unsolicited email from a Bonded Sender can complain to their ISP, enterprise, or IronPort and a financial charge is debited from the bond.
"This market-based mechanism allows email senders to ensure their message gets to their end user, and provides corporate IT managers and ISPs with an objective way to ensure only unwanted messages get blocked. For FAQs and white papers describing the Bonded Sender program, visit http://www.bondedsender.com
This is silly. Even if the time-reversal method could be made to work in the applications for which directed sound is suitable -- which I find outstandingly unlikely -- whether a solution is "better" technically or not frequently (usually?) has nothing to do with whether it ultimately dominates.
There are issues of cost, compatibility with ancillary equipment, considerations like physical size, power consumption, and so on. And these are just the technical considerations.
I don't think I need to go into the "betterness" of the Mac vs. the PC as an example.
I differ with the expressed hypothesis as to why cell phone conversations are obnoxious:
We are programmed to focus our attention on people that "might be speaking to us." This is completely unconscious, but has a "high interrupt level."
When we hear each utterrance (especially when it is LOUD) in a half-conversation, we get the subconscious cue that the person is trying to raise our attention and we get a priority interrupt which we cannot block. This is a (perhaps survival-based?) response that won't go away, I predict.
Researchers in the relatively new UI area of peripheral attention create "polite" UI objects that don't compete for your attention with things you have to attend to with a high priority. These guys use this idea for cute products.
Maybe such researchers can come up with something.
The concept of "bystander UI" referred to in the article is interesting.
Dunno what Jobs' private attitude toward DRM is, but in the 70's he and Woz did some phone phreaking . This was dubbed "theft of service" by Ma Bell and "cool" by the techies of the day. Ma Bell (the monopoly phone company at the time) was the techie anti-Christ of its day, just as the RIAA is today.
It would certainly be consistent of him to be totally cynical about "playing nicely" with the RIAA.
It would be nice if you were right, but there is an argument that you are wrong. You say the RIAA "should be trying to increase downloads like radio stations try to increase listeners."
If the RIAA were to support filesharing, the whole makeup of the filesharing community would change. This re-jiggered community might end up decreasing CD sales, who knows?
Scientists in Philips' research organization have developed liquid lenses
without moving parts, whose focal length can be varied electrically. Prototypes
will be on display at CeBIT Hall 21 Booth B02.
Essentially, the lens consists of two liquids in a glass cylinder outfitted
with electrodes -- a polar, conductive, aqueous solution and a non-conductive
oil. The walls of the cylinder are coated with a hydrophobic material, which
causes the aqueous liquid to form a spherical drop under neutral conditions.
Upon application of a suitable voltage, the drop takes on a concave curvature,
and the lens gathers light. The principle, called electrowetting, was
also recently applied by Philips in the design of a new kind of display.
The prototype has a diameter of three millimeters and
a thickness of two millimeters. The lens can be switched between a focal length
from five centimeters and infinity in ten milliseconds. The prototype has been
subjected to more than one million switching cycles without problems.
Manufacturers are expected to show rising sales and profits over time. In consumer electronics prices drop quickly as a matter of course. The only thing manufacturers can do is dream up features and add them so they can justify resetting the price level. In general, consumers do not reject the new top-heavy product. Partly this is because the less feature-burdened product exits the market and partly because this is because consumers buy potential -- applications they might very well never need or want. There's always this little voice that says "you may want to use it that way sometime."
Most people never program their VCRs to time-shift a program. But how many people would buy a VCR that had no timer -- even for a much lower price?
The creeping feature creature will not be conquered until the consumer rebels.
Proposal:
1. Set up honeypot mailboxes to harvest spam.
2. Parse out links from received spam.
3. Post links on website.
4. Invite your friends who invite their friends who invite their friends... to visit the website when they have nothing better to do and click random links for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't feel bad for him. I feel bad for his students.
In application to the tin-foil hat club, I hereby suggest that Google itself sponsored this contest in order to identify the best techniques for gaming the system.
"This market-based mechanism allows email senders to ensure their message gets to their end user, and provides corporate IT managers and ISPs with an objective way to ensure only unwanted messages get blocked. For FAQs and white papers describing the Bonded Sender program, visit http://www.bondedsender.com
There are issues of cost, compatibility with ancillary equipment, considerations like physical size, power consumption, and so on. And these are just the technical considerations.
I don't think I need to go into the "betterness" of the Mac vs. the PC as an example.
A list of states with their number of party consent requirement is available here.
We are programmed to focus our attention on people that "might be speaking to us." This is completely unconscious, but has a "high interrupt level."
When we hear each utterrance (especially when it is LOUD) in a half-conversation, we get the subconscious cue that the person is trying to raise our attention and we get a priority interrupt which we cannot block. This is a (perhaps survival-based?) response that won't go away, I predict.
Researchers in the relatively new UI area of peripheral attention create "polite" UI objects that don't compete for your attention with things you have to attend to with a high priority. These guys use this idea for cute products.
Maybe such researchers can come up with something.
The concept of "bystander UI" referred to in the article is interesting.
It would certainly be consistent of him to be totally cynical about "playing nicely" with the RIAA.
Scientists in Philips' research organization have developed liquid lenses without moving parts, whose focal length can be varied electrically. Prototypes will be on display at CeBIT Hall 21 Booth B02.
Essentially, the lens consists of two liquids in a glass cylinder outfitted with electrodes -- a polar, conductive, aqueous solution and a non-conductive oil. The walls of the cylinder are coated with a hydrophobic material, which causes the aqueous liquid to form a spherical drop under neutral conditions. Upon application of a suitable voltage, the drop takes on a concave curvature, and the lens gathers light. The principle, called electrowetting, was also recently applied by Philips in the design of a new kind of display.
The prototype has a diameter of three millimeters and a thickness of two millimeters. The lens can be switched between a focal length from five centimeters and infinity in ten milliseconds. The prototype has been subjected to more than one million switching cycles without problems.Manufacturers are expected to show rising sales and profits over time. In consumer electronics prices drop quickly as a matter of course. The only thing manufacturers can do is dream up features and add them so they can justify resetting the price level. In general, consumers do not reject the new top-heavy product. Partly this is because the less feature-burdened product exits the market and partly because this is because consumers buy potential -- applications they might very well never need or want. There's always this little voice that says "you may want to use it that way sometime."
Most people never program their VCRs to time-shift a program. But how many people would buy a VCR that had no timer -- even for a much lower price?
The creeping feature creature will not be conquered until the consumer rebels.
Proposal: 1. Set up honeypot mailboxes to harvest spam. ...
2. Parse out links from received spam.
3. Post links on website.
4. Invite your friends who invite their friends who invite their friends
to visit the website when they have nothing better to do and click random links for a while.