Unless DisplayPort supports DRM, nobody outside of computers is going to support it anyways. Though it certainly well ought to have the bandwidth, I'd hope support for ensnaring our purchased media by the balls and threatening to rip them away from us at the first market downturn gets caught up in committee.
--
I for one welcome our megacorporate overlords.
The internet has an interesting barrier on entry though - a computer and an internet connection. If you can afford those things in China, you can afford what is being advertised to you.
No, not really. In Asia, these things called "internet cafes" have become somewhat trendy. People have actually died in these things while feeding their internet, MMO, and gaming addictions. A person doesn't have to afford a computer, they just have to afford computer time, which is orders of magnitude less expensive at its unit costs, and makes the Asian internet population much greater than the population that can afford computers.
I've lived here for 16 years and can count the number of things I've seen or even heard of affecting my friends on my fingers.
Considering that could be as many as 1023 incidents (2^10-1, assuming you aren't both clumbsy and a carpenter), I hardly find that statement reassuring.
I suppose my quip misses the point, though - if the national government intervenes, it'll be because they want to protect their turf, not because they actually think the state's doing anything that the President wouldn't sign into law in a heartbeat.
Wasn't it a clause in H.R. 3590 to set aside the Constitution and grant full, absolute, and unrestricted power to the U.S. government over its subjects?
You forgot the energy from the collision, which according to E=MC^2 at a theoretical 7TeV adds 1.2e-23 kilograms to the equation and gives an event horizon radius of 1.8e-50 meters.
I believe that means the escape velocity is then 1.2e-9 m/s.
I have no idea if that changes anything, I'm just being pedantic since you brought math into the discussion. Notice that 7TeV is many times the mass of a proton, though for the sake of being pedantic, you forgot that they were colliding a proton with an anti-proton, so even ignoring the collision energy you'd have a black hole twice as massive as your original math suggests.
Very insightful. From a layperson's perspective (of which I am a layperson on the topic of global warming, having done very little direct research), the arguments on either side of the global warming debate are not terribly convincing, with extremists on both sides exhibiting the same religious fervor of any Spanish Inquisitor. Well, okay, neither side has had me arrested or tortured for leaving my computers on at home all day - yet.
This makes Climategate relevant because it shows that there are scientists who seem to be actively involved in the distribution of information that is of dubious turstworthyness. It only makes the AGW's case weaker that various universities and government organizations have refused - in part or in whole - to submit to the FOIA requests that have been made to examine their datasets firsthand. If they're confident in their conclusions, then they've already won the race. There should be no more competition to this science, except for being the first person to say "It's wrong in this particular way, and here's a more accurate model.
It would suck if AGW is real and we're on a collision course for a runaway greenhouse effect. Using a car analogy (as this is Slashdot), doing nothing about that would be like slamming the gas pedal of our Ferrari while traveling 100MPH towards a reinforced bunker wall. That said, it would also suck if the truth is that we're doomed anyways because our Ferrari is actually an 18-wheeler with an oversized load heading downhill at a 70 percent grade, and hitting the brakes is only going to slow our impact from 100MPH to 99.5. With systems the scale of Planet Earth, the semi is easier to picture without concrete, reproducible evidence, or at the very least an extremely thorough analysis of all the data we can gather on the subject. Or maybe there isn't a wall at all, and instead of persecuting Galileo, we're simply hesitant to return to the good old days when witch doctors and fortune tellers were the lead counsels to kings and businessmen. Of course the skeptic wants evidence that's convincing, if not irrefutable.
split the content providers into two companies; one that owns the infrastructure...require the infrastructure company to lease access to any company who wants it at the same price regardless of who is leasing the access
Breaking the law is not an excuse for the state to do anything it wants to you; only what is reasonable.
But "reasonable" is simply defined by the people you allow to run your government. If you don't like someone definition of "reasonable", gather a group of like-minded people and vote them out of office in favor of someone more suited to your legislative tastes. I wouldn't agree with U.K. residents' idea of "reasonable", but I don't have to live there, either.
who can we trust?
Someone with whom you have a specific contract regarding what can and cannot be done with your DNA, and whom you can sue if they breach that contract.
That contract is called "law". See above.
Police, meanwhile, can use that DNA information as they see fit, once they get their hands on it.
Except that they can't - they can only use it as the law allows them to. Police aren't above the law any more than anyone else is... well, anyone except for maybe a Venezuelan dictator or a Nigerian warlord, but can a person be above law within the absence of law?
So, again, why can't we trust the police with this information?
Why not? All they have to do is not break the law, right? Seems simple enough. And besides, we're talking about the police. If we can't trust them with our DNA profiles, who can we trust?
--
Burning karma so you don't have to!
What does game AI have in common with traditional AI? Most traditional AI research is focused on reasoning and pattern matching. Adversarial game AI, particularly of the complexity needed for StarCraft, is usually just a greedy algorithm with preprogrammed responses to predetermined scenarios. Don't get me wrong, game AI tournaments are flashy and stuff, which I guess is why MechMania at the UIUC has been going for 15 years, but they have very little in common with traditional AI.
Disclaimer: I only took a couple of AI courses in college, but I am a game developer, as well as a repeat competitor at and attendee of MechMania at the UIUC (which seems like a reasonably close analog to this competition).
How, exactly, do you know what a person's rights are? I thought the Constitution was a living document whose interpretation should change to follow the times?
Government abolishing the first amendment is change I can believe in.
Au contraire, my mistaken friend. At least in the case the of the U.S., the government has been buying all the banks and choosing to not even pay the bankers. It's the government that has our money.
Pffft. By that logic, anything put into space is a weapon just because it can come back down at a high rate of speed. It's the stated purpose of the design and the degree of trust between two parties that makes anything in space "not a weapon".
Ah, Ventura. The most overruled governor in the state's history. At least he forced the two sides to actually work with each other and compromise in order to get anything done. I think there's some value in that. He also seemed to spend a lot of time hobnobbing in Japan. I wonder if the state got any good business from that.
Only case I can make for manned space flight is for when [...] we eventually hit a tipping point in CO2 levels and the runaway green house effect starts.
You know, or the sun explodes. Granted, that's a ways off, but it's far more certain to occur regardless of human intervention.
Of course as badly as our species is botching this planet not sure we deserve the reprieve.
That's why my proposed solution is to just nuke the entire planet from orbit. When we're as barren as the surface of Mars and our species is little more than a memory, we can stand assured that we will no longer be an ecological hazard.
Let's just hope that enough other species survive that evolution can start over on Earth
...an asteroid the size of a football field wasn't able to kill off all of life, neither was the collision event scientists currently believe is ultimately responsible for the moon, in fact it seems life is extremely hardy and its ingredients are not only capable of surviving re-entry but some actually require impact energies to be formed...
and in a few hundred million years
K-T boundary 'till ecological recovery was less than 50 million years...
The only other rationale for manned space exploration is it does restore a sense of adventure and frontiers to conquer
History 101: Mankind's early ventures across the ocean were in search of unclaimed mineral wealth (read: GOLD).
There are no longer any frontiers on this planet with the possible exception of the deep oceans.
Spelunkers would beg to differ.
Of course NASA in particular has turned the manned space program in to such a complete yawner
No, the politicians and press did that after we beat the Russians to the moon, even before the Cold War had ended.
no one believes
...except Slashdotters, amatuer astronomers, space fans, or and scientists around the world
they will break through any frontiers if you did give them the funding. Robotic spacecraft are the only ones breaking frontiers at this point
...Itself no small feat, though admittedly easier and less risky than sending living organisms...
so they deserve the money until you are going to commit to colonizing Mars.
Well, I seem to recall that a recent U.S. president had tried to commit us to colonizing Mars within a few decades, but then some bad people ran a couple of airplanes into a few buildings, and things kind of went to shit and the Mars things got forgotten about.
If I had mod points, you'd totally be getting modded down.
In the end, capitalism is not the problem, nor is DRM. In fact, I don't see a problem here, except for these old business models that are on their way to extinction, but are grasping at straws in the hopes of staying alive. What's going to happen in a free market economy is that these models are going to go away. They're going to go away because cheaper, higher-quality alternatives exist. I hope many slashdotters have figured this out.
There might be a problem with the movers and shakers behind these old models colluding to overthrow the free market economy. That's just another form of dictatorship, which is not a free market or capitalism. Hopefully governments side with the free market that best benefit the citizens, but if the media moguls manage to buy out our senators and representatives, that isn't representative democracy or capitalism - that's corruption.
This is where I'd like to say that it would help to involve yourself in the government, write your representatives, etc., but I live in the United States. My "representatives" aren't listening to me these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless DisplayPort supports DRM, nobody outside of computers is going to support it anyways. Though it certainly well ought to have the bandwidth, I'd hope support for ensnaring our purchased media by the balls and threatening to rip them away from us at the first market downturn gets caught up in committee.
--
I for one welcome our megacorporate overlords.
If people knew what was really going on, talks would probably break down from public outcry alone.
Why do you think that? It didn't work for health care reform in the U.S. The politicians just became more blatant about their secrecy.
Well, wtf were *you* thinking, voting a senator from the most famously corrupt state in the union into the office of the President?
Makes me wish I'd owned land in Utah for that election. I would have made a killing selling "oceanfront property".
The internet has an interesting barrier on entry though - a computer and an internet connection. If you can afford those things in China, you can afford what is being advertised to you.
No, not really. In Asia, these things called "internet cafes" have become somewhat trendy. People have actually died in these things while feeding their internet, MMO, and gaming addictions. A person doesn't have to afford a computer, they just have to afford computer time, which is orders of magnitude less expensive at its unit costs, and makes the Asian internet population much greater than the population that can afford computers.
That's amazing! I have the same combination on my luggage! ...too soon?
I've lived here for 16 years and can count the number of things I've seen or even heard of affecting my friends on my fingers.
Considering that could be as many as 1023 incidents (2^10-1, assuming you aren't both clumbsy and a carpenter), I hardly find that statement reassuring.
I suppose my quip misses the point, though - if the national government intervenes, it'll be because they want to protect their turf, not because they actually think the state's doing anything that the President wouldn't sign into law in a heartbeat.
Wasn't it a clause in H.R. 3590 to set aside the Constitution and grant full, absolute, and unrestricted power to the U.S. government over its subjects?
You forgot the energy from the collision, which according to E=MC^2 at a theoretical 7TeV adds 1.2e-23 kilograms to the equation and gives an event horizon radius of 1.8e-50 meters.
I believe that means the escape velocity is then 1.2e-9 m/s.
I have no idea if that changes anything, I'm just being pedantic since you brought math into the discussion. Notice that 7TeV is many times the mass of a proton, though for the sake of being pedantic, you forgot that they were colliding a proton with an anti-proton, so even ignoring the collision energy you'd have a black hole twice as massive as your original math suggests.
Long-term data storage is dead! All hail long-term data storage!
Yeah, computer help desks around the world would have to learn something besides "try rebooting the computer"!
It's almost as if they /wanted/ it to be jailbroken, sooner than later.
Very insightful. From a layperson's perspective (of which I am a layperson on the topic of global warming, having done very little direct research), the arguments on either side of the global warming debate are not terribly convincing, with extremists on both sides exhibiting the same religious fervor of any Spanish Inquisitor. Well, okay, neither side has had me arrested or tortured for leaving my computers on at home all day - yet.
This makes Climategate relevant because it shows that there are scientists who seem to be actively involved in the distribution of information that is of dubious turstworthyness. It only makes the AGW's case weaker that various universities and government organizations have refused - in part or in whole - to submit to the FOIA requests that have been made to examine their datasets firsthand. If they're confident in their conclusions, then they've already won the race. There should be no more competition to this science, except for being the first person to say "It's wrong in this particular way, and here's a more accurate model.
It would suck if AGW is real and we're on a collision course for a runaway greenhouse effect. Using a car analogy (as this is Slashdot), doing nothing about that would be like slamming the gas pedal of our Ferrari while traveling 100MPH towards a reinforced bunker wall. That said, it would also suck if the truth is that we're doomed anyways because our Ferrari is actually an 18-wheeler with an oversized load heading downhill at a 70 percent grade, and hitting the brakes is only going to slow our impact from 100MPH to 99.5. With systems the scale of Planet Earth, the semi is easier to picture without concrete, reproducible evidence, or at the very least an extremely thorough analysis of all the data we can gather on the subject. Or maybe there isn't a wall at all, and instead of persecuting Galileo, we're simply hesitant to return to the good old days when witch doctors and fortune tellers were the lead counsels to kings and businessmen. Of course the skeptic wants evidence that's convincing, if not irrefutable.
split the content providers into two companies; one that owns the infrastructure...require the infrastructure company to lease access to any company who wants it at the same price regardless of who is leasing the access
You mean make cable a regulated utility?
blah blah blah driven Khan into space blah blah blah
Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan~!
Wow! I never realized the first astronauts were so fat.
Breaking the law is not an excuse for the state to do anything it wants to you; only what is reasonable.
But "reasonable" is simply defined by the people you allow to run your government. If you don't like someone definition of "reasonable", gather a group of like-minded people and vote them out of office in favor of someone more suited to your legislative tastes. I wouldn't agree with U.K. residents' idea of "reasonable", but I don't have to live there, either.
who can we trust?
Someone with whom you have a specific contract regarding what can and cannot be done with your DNA, and whom you can sue if they breach that contract.
That contract is called "law". See above.
Police, meanwhile, can use that DNA information as they see fit, once they get their hands on it.
Except that they can't - they can only use it as the law allows them to. Police aren't above the law any more than anyone else is... well, anyone except for maybe a Venezuelan dictator or a Nigerian warlord, but can a person be above law within the absence of law? So, again, why can't we trust the police with this information?
Why not? All they have to do is not break the law, right? Seems simple enough. And besides, we're talking about the police. If we can't trust them with our DNA profiles, who can we trust?
--
Burning karma so you don't have to!
What does game AI have in common with traditional AI? Most traditional AI research is focused on reasoning and pattern matching. Adversarial game AI, particularly of the complexity needed for StarCraft, is usually just a greedy algorithm with preprogrammed responses to predetermined scenarios. Don't get me wrong, game AI tournaments are flashy and stuff, which I guess is why MechMania at the UIUC has been going for 15 years, but they have very little in common with traditional AI.
Disclaimer: I only took a couple of AI courses in college, but I am a game developer, as well as a repeat competitor at and attendee of MechMania at the UIUC (which seems like a reasonably close analog to this competition).
How, exactly, do you know what a person's rights are? I thought the Constitution was a living document whose interpretation should change to follow the times?
Government abolishing the first amendment is change I can believe in.
Au contraire, my mistaken friend. At least in the case the of the U.S., the government has been buying all the banks and choosing to not even pay the bankers. It's the government that has our money.
Your second point is still valid.
Pffft. By that logic, anything put into space is a weapon just because it can come back down at a high rate of speed. It's the stated purpose of the design and the degree of trust between two parties that makes anything in space "not a weapon".
Ah, Ventura. The most overruled governor in the state's history. At least he forced the two sides to actually work with each other and compromise in order to get anything done. I think there's some value in that. He also seemed to spend a lot of time hobnobbing in Japan. I wonder if the state got any good business from that.
Only case I can make for manned space flight is for when [...] we eventually hit a tipping point in CO2 levels and the runaway green house effect starts.
You know, or the sun explodes. Granted, that's a ways off, but it's far more certain to occur regardless of human intervention.
Of course as badly as our species is botching this planet not sure we deserve the reprieve.
That's why my proposed solution is to just nuke the entire planet from orbit. When we're as barren as the surface of Mars and our species is little more than a memory, we can stand assured that we will no longer be an ecological hazard.
Let's just hope that enough other species survive that evolution can start over on Earth
...an asteroid the size of a football field wasn't able to kill off all of life, neither was the collision event scientists currently believe is ultimately responsible for the moon, in fact it seems life is extremely hardy and its ingredients are not only capable of surviving re-entry but some actually require impact energies to be formed...
and in a few hundred million years
K-T boundary 'till ecological recovery was less than 50 million years...
The only other rationale for manned space exploration is it does restore a sense of adventure and frontiers to conquer
History 101: Mankind's early ventures across the ocean were in search of unclaimed mineral wealth (read: GOLD).
There are no longer any frontiers on this planet with the possible exception of the deep oceans.
Spelunkers would beg to differ.
Of course NASA in particular has turned the manned space program in to such a complete yawner
No, the politicians and press did that after we beat the Russians to the moon, even before the Cold War had ended.
no one believes
...except Slashdotters, amatuer astronomers, space fans, or and scientists around the world
they will break through any frontiers if you did give them the funding. Robotic spacecraft are the only ones breaking frontiers at this point
...Itself no small feat, though admittedly easier and less risky than sending living organisms...
so they deserve the money until you are going to commit to colonizing Mars.
Well, I seem to recall that a recent U.S. president had tried to commit us to colonizing Mars within a few decades, but then some bad people ran a couple of airplanes into a few buildings, and things kind of went to shit and the Mars things got forgotten about.
If I had mod points, you'd totally be getting modded down.
In the end, capitalism is not the problem, nor is DRM. In fact, I don't see a problem here, except for these old business models that are on their way to extinction, but are grasping at straws in the hopes of staying alive. What's going to happen in a free market economy is that these models are going to go away. They're going to go away because cheaper, higher-quality alternatives exist. I hope many slashdotters have figured this out.
There might be a problem with the movers and shakers behind these old models colluding to overthrow the free market economy. That's just another form of dictatorship, which is not a free market or capitalism. Hopefully governments side with the free market that best benefit the citizens, but if the media moguls manage to buy out our senators and representatives, that isn't representative democracy or capitalism - that's corruption.
This is where I'd like to say that it would help to involve yourself in the government, write your representatives, etc., but I live in the United States. My "representatives" aren't listening to me these days.