The source of the laser that I had in mind was the remaining section of the Deep Impact probe, with all the cameras capturing the impact. Those same cameras could potentially have included beam splitters and narrowband filters to pick up the refelected laser light.
I guess they didn't bother because mono sound just doesn't cut it with today's consumers. They would have needed a fleet of probes to capture it in full surround sound...
On a serious note though, could a laser reflected off the comet necleus have been able to capture the seismic vibrations? (and thus tell us even more about the interior)
Unless you're using Photoshop. It's well known that the lastest versions already refuse to deal with images of money, but who knows what else might cause them to seize up - it's not impossible that they could also keep a look for hidden watermarks in other stuff too. How long before there's an embeddable "copyright" watermark that stops your imaging software in its tracks?
Outsiders will bring a fresh perspective to the problem. There may well be company-wide perceptions that certain pieces of code are "safe" within MS, so they don't get as much checking as they should.
Yes, you could isolate your own blue team from the rest of MS, but why not just go the whole hog? Plus, this way you don't have to pay for the benefits you mention.
And finally, by getting people outside to do the work of searching for flaws, you get many more people for your money - you only have to reward the ones who find something, rather than paying them all a salary even if they don't find anything this month.
Actually, the route takes you up to the north of Canada, then down through the Bering straight.
With a little adjustment, it's possible to fly over open ocean for a good chunk of the journey - along the top of mainland Canada and Alaska, then slow down for the Bering straight, then floor it again for a blast down through the Pacific, past the Kamchatka peninsula, and on to Tokyo.
Does the inability to fly supersonically over land really limit you that much? After all, three quarters of the Earth's surface is covered with water.
Apart from Canada and Mexico, pretty much every international flight from the US would involve flight over oceans - even for trips to South America, you could follow the coast down, a couple of hundred miles offshore.
Only politicians could come up with a scheme this fucked up. The solution is pretty damn obvious:
Ban the sale of the "full" version of windows in the EU.
Then, if customers want a media player, they'll have to install one. Sure, they might download it from MS, but they might also download it from somewhere else, giving the competition a look in, which was the whole point of this exercise.
Because otherwise the thing will be so expensive that no-one can afford to buy it.
If they adopt the same strategy that all console makers to date have, then they'll sell the hardware at a loss and make their money back on the games.
Re:translating GPL
on
Drafting GPL3
·
· Score: 2, Funny
On the contrary, if they translated it to a language that had a clear distinction between free (as in beer) and free (as in speech), then that alone could save untold amounts of confusion.
PS2 Linux was a disaster. First, it was ludicrously expensive - considering you were paying for a free OS. Then there was the whole fiasco about suitable displays - you could only play games on a TV, but only use Linux on a monitor (and one with a "Sync on green" facility too). And finally, they crippled access to all the interesting bits of the system too for good measure.
If that was their idea of opening up the system, then I don't hold out much hope for Linux on PS3.
Why is this so implausible? In the case of Windows on PS3, it's a win-win situation for Microsoft - they might get to sell a few more copies of Windows, and if it really takes off, then people might start buying PS3s rather than PCs - and presumably Sony will be making a loss on every PS3, so that's a win for MS too.
I remember reading about such a setup in New Scientist a year or two ago. The equipment continually monitored the shape of the eye, which apparently changes multiple times per second, and corrected for it.
The upshot was that they could take just about anyone, apply this equipment, and they ended up with vision 4 times sharper than "perfect" - (20/5?)
The downside was that the equipment took up a large lab bench... Hopefully one day they'll be able to shrink it down.
We're already close to glasses that can be adjusted to different strengths through the use of liquid lenses and electric fields, but they won't offer the ability to correct for variances across the field of view as the above equipment was.
By rights mapping ought to be the ultimate community application - it's inherently distributed by nature.
If everyone was to map out their local area by means of GPS and some simple software, then all the small patches could be combined into a street level map of the whole world. Or at least, the part of it populated by people with GPS receivers.
I guess that's the problem at the moment. Hopefully, once they start embedding GPS receivers in every cell phone, this sort of application will really take off.
Think of it as a sort of mapping equivalent of Wikipedia. It may not be perfect, but it would be far more comprehensive and up to date than any commercial effort could ever be.
Actually the amount of redundancy they appear to have allowed for is stunning - the implication of the statement you quote is that not only could they survive a disaster that takes out a whole city, but they could also survive a disaster that takes out two nearby cities.
London and New York are far enough apart...
About the only disaster on that scale I can imagine is a major asteroid strike. And it appears they plan to continue serving webpages after it happens.
Plus it would make them all but indestructable. I'm waiting for a 10GB solid state MP3 player.
What I can't understand is why no-one yet appears to have come up with a solid state MP3 player that relies on removable storage. If you used something like an XD card, then the player could be tiny, and as bigger capacity cards are released, you could simply plug a new card in. Or you could carry a few around with you and swap them as necessary.
The nearest thing to this I've seen is with PDAs that have card slots, but they cost hundreds; I'm thinking more of something that only needs to cost say 30 dollars. How much would the electronics in an MP3 player cost without the storage?
Even a single seater fighter is a big beast, compared to say, a family car. If you've ever seen a Harrier thump down on the deck of a carrier, you'll see that the suspension gives considerably more than 10cm as the plane makes contact. I think 10cm is more than good enough - certainly better than any current pilot, and they seem to do OK.
Lucas is in a different position to just about any other filmmaker though, since he's the one supplying the funding, and who holds all the rights.
Therefore the Hollywood suits can plead all they like, but he can tell them to get lost with impunity.
I find it hard to believe that Lucas himself is that interested in the money that he'd be so willing to ruin his "vision" of the series, which was ultimately all about the rise, fall, and ultimate redemption of Anakin Skywalker.
Maybe he'll be wiling to let someone else have a stab at a few more films, but I think that the money is much less important in this case than you might think.
Sourcecode for a working implementation should be supplied and available when locating the patent application
Again, allow me to present a counter argument.
One of the problems with patents is that, if you patent something, then I'm not allowed to make use of it, even if I invent it completely independently. So the patent blocks the whole field. Everyone can find out the details of the new patent, and knows they can't do that. The current situation encourages people to file patent applications that are written in the most obscure form possible, so as to attempt to trap people who unwittingly invent the same thing independently, which hardly seems fair.
On the other hand, if the patent details were kept secret, then you could have a scenario with 2 different options:
1) I can choose to license your invention, as before.
2) I invent the same thing independently (since I don't have access to the details of your technique). I'm free to use my version of the invention, and license it to people, for less than your version, if I want. If you want to keep ahead, you better invent something new, so the incentive to innovate is preserved. This doesn't destroy the worth of your original patent, since if it was for something really innovative, it may take years before someone else re-invents it. So this auto-adjusts the effective duration of patents - obvious ones get quickly made useless, while really good ones might persist for decades.
Slashdot Mirror
The source of the laser that I had in mind was the remaining section of the Deep Impact probe, with all the cameras capturing the impact. Those same cameras could potentially have included beam splitters and narrowband filters to pick up the refelected laser light.
I guess they didn't bother because mono sound just doesn't cut it with today's consumers. They would have needed a fleet of probes to capture it in full surround sound...
On a serious note though, could a laser reflected off the comet necleus have been able to capture the seismic vibrations? (and thus tell us even more about the interior)
Unless you're using Photoshop. It's well known that the lastest versions already refuse to deal with images of money, but who knows what else might cause them to seize up - it's not impossible that they could also keep a look for hidden watermarks in other stuff too. How long before there's an embeddable "copyright" watermark that stops your imaging software in its tracks?
Outsiders will bring a fresh perspective to the problem. There may well be company-wide perceptions that certain pieces of code are "safe" within MS, so they don't get as much checking as they should.
Yes, you could isolate your own blue team from the rest of MS, but why not just go the whole hog? Plus, this way you don't have to pay for the benefits you mention.
And finally, by getting people outside to do the work of searching for flaws, you get many more people for your money - you only have to reward the ones who find something, rather than paying them all a salary even if they don't find anything this month.
Umm, remember that Concorde was designed in the 60s, and it's *still* the best commercial supersonic aircraft to date.
Jumbos from the same era still fill the skies too.
Advances in aviation don't happen as fast as you seem to think.
Actually, the route takes you up to the north of Canada, then down through the Bering straight.
With a little adjustment, it's possible to fly over open ocean for a good chunk of the journey - along the top of mainland Canada and Alaska, then slow down for the Bering straight, then floor it again for a blast down through the Pacific, past the Kamchatka peninsula, and on to Tokyo.
Does the inability to fly supersonically over land really limit you that much? After all, three quarters of the Earth's surface is covered with water.
Apart from Canada and Mexico, pretty much every international flight from the US would involve flight over oceans - even for trips to South America, you could follow the coast down, a couple of hundred miles offshore.
Only politicians could come up with a scheme this fucked up. The solution is pretty damn obvious:
Ban the sale of the "full" version of windows in the EU.
Then, if customers want a media player, they'll have to install one. Sure, they might download it from MS, but they might also download it from somewhere else, giving the competition a look in, which was the whole point of this exercise.
Was that so hard?
Because otherwise the thing will be so expensive that no-one can afford to buy it.
If they adopt the same strategy that all console makers to date have, then they'll sell the hardware at a loss and make their money back on the games.
On the contrary, if they translated it to a language that had a clear distinction between free (as in beer) and free (as in speech), then that alone could save untold amounts of confusion.
PS2 Linux was a disaster. First, it was ludicrously expensive - considering you were paying for a free OS. Then there was the whole fiasco about suitable displays - you could only play games on a TV, but only use Linux on a monitor (and one with a "Sync on green" facility too). And finally, they crippled access to all the interesting bits of the system too for good measure.
If that was their idea of opening up the system, then I don't hold out much hope for Linux on PS3.
Why is this so implausible? In the case of Windows on PS3, it's a win-win situation for Microsoft - they might get to sell a few more copies of Windows, and if it really takes off, then people might start buying PS3s rather than PCs - and presumably Sony will be making a loss on every PS3, so that's a win for MS too.
I remember reading about such a setup in New Scientist a year or two ago. The equipment continually monitored the shape of the eye, which apparently changes multiple times per second, and corrected for it.
The upshot was that they could take just about anyone, apply this equipment, and they ended up with vision 4 times sharper than "perfect" - (20/5?)
The downside was that the equipment took up a large lab bench... Hopefully one day they'll be able to shrink it down.
We're already close to glasses that can be adjusted to different strengths through the use of liquid lenses and electric fields, but they won't offer the ability to correct for variances across the field of view as the above equipment was.
By rights mapping ought to be the ultimate community application - it's inherently distributed by nature.
If everyone was to map out their local area by means of GPS and some simple software, then all the small patches could be combined into a street level map of the whole world. Or at least, the part of it populated by people with GPS receivers.
I guess that's the problem at the moment. Hopefully, once they start embedding GPS receivers in every cell phone, this sort of application will really take off.
Think of it as a sort of mapping equivalent of Wikipedia. It may not be perfect, but it would be far more comprehensive and up to date than any commercial effort could ever be.
It'll save him having to leave his desk.
What's that great big thing heading towards me so very fast? It needs a big, wide sounding name. Ow, ound, round, Ground!
I wonder if it will be friends with me?...
Actually the amount of redundancy they appear to have allowed for is stunning - the implication of the statement you quote is that not only could they survive a disaster that takes out a whole city, but they could also survive a disaster that takes out two nearby cities.
London and New York are far enough apart...
About the only disaster on that scale I can imagine is a major asteroid strike. And it appears they plan to continue serving webpages after it happens.
Wow.
You'd better just hope they don't post a story with a link to slashdot...
Do Sony and MS actually expect me to toss out my entire entertainment system to replace it with their all in one box?
Given the stupid curved sufaces on both the new Xbox and the PS3, the answer would appear to be yes.
Plus it would make them all but indestructable. I'm waiting for a 10GB solid state MP3 player.
What I can't understand is why no-one yet appears to have come up with a solid state MP3 player that relies on removable storage. If you used something like an XD card, then the player could be tiny, and as bigger capacity cards are released, you could simply plug a new card in. Or you could carry a few around with you and swap them as necessary.
The nearest thing to this I've seen is with PDAs that have card slots, but they cost hundreds; I'm thinking more of something that only needs to cost say 30 dollars. How much would the electronics in an MP3 player cost without the storage?
Even a single seater fighter is a big beast, compared to say, a family car. If you've ever seen a Harrier thump down on the deck of a carrier, you'll see that the suspension gives considerably more than 10cm as the plane makes contact. I think 10cm is more than good enough - certainly better than any current pilot, and they seem to do OK.
Lucas is in a different position to just about any other filmmaker though, since he's the one supplying the funding, and who holds all the rights.
Therefore the Hollywood suits can plead all they like, but he can tell them to get lost with impunity.
I find it hard to believe that Lucas himself is that interested in the money that he'd be so willing to ruin his "vision" of the series, which was ultimately all about the rise, fall, and ultimate redemption of Anakin Skywalker.
Maybe he'll be wiling to let someone else have a stab at a few more films, but I think that the money is much less important in this case than you might think.
You're not the only one to propose this, and I agree, it's one of the strongest arguments I've heard.
The problem is how do you persuade legislators to stop legislating? That's what they do...
Getting rid of most of them might be nice, but it's not realistic.
Very good document.
Sourcecode for a working implementation should be supplied and available when locating the patent application
Again, allow me to present a counter argument.
One of the problems with patents is that, if you patent something, then I'm not allowed to make use of it, even if I invent it completely independently. So the patent blocks the whole field. Everyone can find out the details of the new patent, and knows they can't do that. The current situation encourages people to file patent applications that are written in the most obscure form possible, so as to attempt to trap people who unwittingly invent the same thing independently, which hardly seems fair.
On the other hand, if the patent details were kept secret, then you could have a scenario with 2 different options:
1) I can choose to license your invention, as before.
2) I invent the same thing independently (since I don't have access to the details of your technique). I'm free to use my version of the invention, and license it to people, for less than your version, if I want. If you want to keep ahead, you better invent something new, so the incentive to innovate is preserved. This doesn't destroy the worth of your original patent, since if it was for something really innovative, it may take years before someone else re-invents it. So this auto-adjusts the effective duration of patents - obvious ones get quickly made useless, while really good ones might persist for decades.