So while I'm all for more efficient electric lighting, it would be nice to see no electric lighting used during daylight hours when the sun is readily available.
Or, if you can't avoid using the lights, power them by solar panel.
Hey, if everyone were to be reasonable, inaccuracy wouldn't be a big problem.
If I can be 99.99% certain that when the radar/lidar/alcohol detector/whatever is more than, say, 10% in excess of the legal limit, the radar is probably right and I will pay a reasonable fine. We'll all have to communicate our idea of "reasonable" to our representatives... both in terms of what our laws will say with regards to the limit, but also to the accuracy issue.
Lay it down in real terms, and I'll agree to what's reasonable: I'll commit to staying at a speed that my speedometer reads as within 10% of the limit, and I'll pay a $20 fine if the accuracy is such that only one out of a thousand "tagged" are falsely accused. The accuracy test will be designed by knowledgeable experts, and all components of the system shall be "open source": no hidden proprietary black boxes allowed.
I'll play fair if everyone else plays fair. It's in my best interests. And putting it all in an open light will achieve rewards for everyone that is worthy of them.
Set up a contract that is in the software developers' favour: a license of $X per year, indexed against inflation, terminable upon the discovery of a bug in the software. Set up a bounty that's equal to the license value. On discovery of a bug, the (quarterly|annual) license fee is instead paid to the bounty hunter; the software developer gets nada. This is an equitable arrangement: we get increased personal safety, by paying some amount of tax dollar to the dude who wrote the code for the detectors. Cool, that.
If the code is any good, the developer will be nicely set for life. The states will continue to license it for as long as that software is (a) acceptably bug-free or (b) not displaced by a more-functional product that would better serve the public's interest. This new product might well be from the same developer: we're cool with that; it might not, but it's not like we're gonna chuck out a few million dollar's worth of detectors on a whim.
We'd all be winners in that scenario. I'm all for tossing into the kitty for a good product like that. There's 25 million of us, each drop a quarter in the bucket, that's a damn good paycheque for the guys that make a good product. It could be a coupla guys in a garage for all I care, just so long as it works. Any doofus can contract out a decent design to some Chinese company, make a bunch of open source, damned reliable breathe detectors, and license them via web commerce. A single smart guy could do it.
Alas, I'm not that guy. I suspect the guy will know something about FPGAs, assembly programming, and case design, perhaps coupling up with a web designer who's also a bit techy and a programmer who's a bit hardware-geeky. Toss in someone to oversee management -- which is to say specifically that the manager's job is to be the grease between the wheels: your job is to make damn sure everyone has what they need in order to get things done, and stand out of the way while they do it. Make sure the web guys are providing the 'geers with the knowledge resources they need to do their job, all the wikis and bugtrackers and forums and shit; make sure the hardware guy and software guy are on the same wavelength; make sure the engineers are dumping their brains into the databases so that we can exercise that information to make the next revision so fucking mindblowing we'll own the entire nation's breathe alcohol detector market. That's a whole lotta dough.
And might I remind the inventor that I truly believe we're on the cusp of destroying the earth. I don't hold much more than two generations before we must do something or be rendered extinct. I truly believe we're headed for a magnetic, climatic, and environmental flip-flop, and I think we may have accelerated a natural event with our polluting and destructive ways.
If this is the case, and this technology is essential to my survival (or the survival of my children's children), then it's going to be just as essential to the inventor's survival as well. It is in his best interests to be very fair in negotiating our price, because his ass is also on the line.
Hey, if their patent claims are truly unique, original ideas that it took some amount of ingenuity to invent, I'm all for them making a reasonable profit by their invention.
If it's something terrifically essential to my survival, I won't be held hostage to their greed. If it isn't that dire, then there'll be an agreeable, negotiable contract between us consumers and the inventor. No problem there.
I downloaded Firefox several times, but particularly after it hit 1.0 release status (the initial download and a couple of bug upgrades).
I've ended up staying with Opera. It's just much, much better in the end.
So can we have those stats updated to reflect that my downloads ended up being a waste of time? Just pretend I didn't do it, and we'll all be happier for it. I know I am!
...'cause the FCC is going to do everything it can to remain on the public's payroll. There's too much at stake for them -- to wit, all their jobs.
Kinda like the DEA: a complete and utter failure by every conceivable measure, yet they still suck bajillions of dollars out of the taxpayers' pockets.
But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free?
Er... those of us without cable television? Who will never have cable television, because we absolutely refuse to pay to view commercials?
Artists, I promise you this: if you release your works in a DRM-free format, I promise that when I download and enjoy your work to the extent that I listen to it more than a few times, ie. it becomes a staple item in my collection, I will pay you for it.
This offer is not available to artists who are members of RIAA or CCRA.
Aural realism is more important. That's the one thing that has made the great games great: the use of audio cues and audio environment to enhance the gaming experience. From Doom through System Shock through Thief, it's always come down to audio, not photorealism.
Here's how it works, Bob: you make it possible for me to very easily pay you a price I like and I won't pirate it. Because, you see, it's to my advantage to pay for it.
Basically, Bob, you're a hooker: you got something I want, I got something you want, and we gotta agree on a price.
Indeed, you're one of three hookers on this block. You lucked out: the only parking spot was around the corner, so you're the first hooker that's got something to offer. There's another hooker half-way down the block: she's the "reparatory" hooker. The one at the end of the block is the "blockbusters" hooker. And past the end and across the tracks is the "torrent" hooker. All the hookers on this block are looking pretty much the same, but within that range, you're definately the tops, Bob.
Now, Bob, you seem to think you're worth about twenty-five bucks. Because by the time I pay for my ticket and my wife's, we're getting into that range.
I want you to know the reparatory hooker only wants twelve bucks. I just have to walk down to her; not long, 'cause I'm not so overwhelming horny that I just gotta get blown right this second, Bob. And the blockbusters whore, why she's just four bucks -- but she'll blow me twice and I don't have to leave my house!
The torrent whore gives free blowjobs, but she's got ragged teeth and is pretty de-rezzed. I'm not such a cheap sumbitch that I'll go to her, Bob. I do pay for my movie entertainment.
Anyway, Bob, my point is this: you're an overpriced whore. I almost always rent the DVD; when I don't, I almost always end up at the reparatory. The last mainstream cinema showing I attended was Lord of the Rings. Exceptionally few films justify the first-print, top-rate quality, IMO.
So anyway, my point is this: so long as the free whore is skanky-looking, I'm not going to pirate: I'll take whatever reasonable cheap alternative provides me a home-system-quality experience. That experience is not going to be worth more than a DVD rental.
People at the office tend to avoid me. In fact, if I eat enough of the stuff (see above), even people whose noses are stuffed up with the flu tend to avoid me. Haven't had a cold in two years.
Most of us geeks accomplish it just by not showering.
The public health risk of resurrecting the virus is minimal, U.S. health officials said. People around the world developed immunity to the deadly 1918 virus after the pandemic, and a a certain degree of immunity is believed to persist today. Also, in previous research, scientists concluded that modern antiviral medicines are effective against Spanish flu-like viruses.
Let me interpret that for you:
Our immunity against this disease sucks.
If we even have an immunity, that is.
Of course big pharma will make a lot of money.
So it's all okay.
Except that, of course, they can not manufacture it fast enough to contain an outbreak if an outbreak were to occur. It would spread quickly while they struggle to find enough material (chickens) to manufacture adequate amounts. You can't go from a few hundred to a few million vials overnight. The pox can.
(On a political note, the rich would be okay, because they'll be able to buy blackmarket anti-virals. The poor can be fucked, as always.)
And note that Tombaugh did not locate Planet X. He located Pluto, which is surely an amazing feat!, but he did not locate a planetary mass that accounted for the gravity signature of Planet X. To this day, Planet X eludes us.
AFAIK Pluto is by all rational logic *not* a planet. It is piddling small, for one: half the size of merely the USA. Its orbit is completely off-kilter from *every* other planet, both out-of-alignment with the solar plane and with an eccentric orbit that has it swinging inside the path of Uranus. And it isn't even one chunk of rock: it appears to be a couple of half-sized chunks in very close proximity to one another!
Pluto is a Kuiper object by all rational logic.
It's officially a planet due to politics: it's the first planet the US Americans discovered, and ego demands it retain its planetary status. D-oh! Dumb scientists.
It makes *NO* sense to mail MSWord documents except when *wanting them to be changed*, ie. shared writing or editing. Otherwise the document should be in some sort of secure format, even one as minimally secure as PDF. For the life of me, I can not understand why anyone would mail out sensitive information in a format that allows the recipient to easily and immediately change it to say whatever he wants.
Anyhoo, *PDF releases us from the MSWord noose* and that *is* important. It means much more acceptance for using other tools for generating documents.
I'll believe it when I see it, though. Microsoft *can not* afford to lose their iron grip over the Office market. They're going to fuxx0r PDF in some proprietary way, you just know it.
I daresay Apple could fully well step right into RIAA's territory and sign up artists for exclusive distribution. I know if I were choosing a rep, it'd be someone like Apple, which would very likely strike a win-win deal that enables me to make a good living as an artist; than someone like RIAA, which I know will do everything in its power to fuck me over and leave me indebted to them.
I should go find out what happened between Apple Computers and Apple Records. I'm a little surprised Apple is in the music business, given their original agreement with Apple Records was to stay well the hell out of anything that looked like music.
If Apple were smart enough to have just bought AR outright, they might very well already have a mechanism in place to support artists. And that, my friends, would be the start of the entertainment revolution: independents who can make a good solid living from their work.
I think this may be where Google is going with their dark fibre network.
They can easily set up a seed node network that will ensure reasonable download times for any file. They can easily set up a peer node network that pays the peers to host files. They can offer a proprietary video format that inserts a single, targetted commercial to the video file you receive.
Google makes its money from the advertisers. It shares out some of that revenue with cooperative peers. It has control of seeds, to ensure quality of service. Hell, charge end-users a buck for the download, and reimburse it if they share 125% of it.
End-users get a television show with but a single commercial, and end-users have the opportunity to receive payment for hosting those torrents they really liked (or didn't like, but want to make money on).
It'd sure work for me. I have no problem dedicating a good chunk of drivespace and CPU time to torrenting my favourite shows, and would be especially co-operative if I made a few bucks off it.
Or, rather, I sure as hell hope there's no irony! I'm gonna be pissed if fifty years from now, the comet they pushed ends up smashing into Earth. That sorta shit can just ruin a fellow's day.
Slashdot Mirror
So while I'm all for more efficient electric lighting, it would be nice to see no electric lighting used during daylight hours when the sun is readily available.
Or, if you can't avoid using the lights, power them by solar panel.
...but being scientists, I doubt it. Scientists often seem to lack that sort of foresight.
Hey, if everyone were to be reasonable, inaccuracy wouldn't be a big problem.
If I can be 99.99% certain that when the radar/lidar/alcohol detector/whatever is more than, say, 10% in excess of the legal limit, the radar is probably right and I will pay a reasonable fine. We'll all have to communicate our idea of "reasonable" to our representatives... both in terms of what our laws will say with regards to the limit, but also to the accuracy issue.
Lay it down in real terms, and I'll agree to what's reasonable: I'll commit to staying at a speed that my speedometer reads as within 10% of the limit, and I'll pay a $20 fine if the accuracy is such that only one out of a thousand "tagged" are falsely accused. The accuracy test will be designed by knowledgeable experts, and all components of the system shall be "open source": no hidden proprietary black boxes allowed.
I'll play fair if everyone else plays fair. It's in my best interests. And putting it all in an open light will achieve rewards for everyone that is worthy of them.
Set up a contract that is in the software developers' favour: a license of $X per year, indexed against inflation, terminable upon the discovery of a bug in the software. Set up a bounty that's equal to the license value. On discovery of a bug, the (quarterly|annual) license fee is instead paid to the bounty hunter; the software developer gets nada. This is an equitable arrangement: we get increased personal safety, by paying some amount of tax dollar to the dude who wrote the code for the detectors. Cool, that.
If the code is any good, the developer will be nicely set for life. The states will continue to license it for as long as that software is (a) acceptably bug-free or (b) not displaced by a more-functional product that would better serve the public's interest. This new product might well be from the same developer: we're cool with that; it might not, but it's not like we're gonna chuck out a few million dollar's worth of detectors on a whim.
We'd all be winners in that scenario. I'm all for tossing into the kitty for a good product like that. There's 25 million of us, each drop a quarter in the bucket, that's a damn good paycheque for the guys that make a good product. It could be a coupla guys in a garage for all I care, just so long as it works. Any doofus can contract out a decent design to some Chinese company, make a bunch of open source, damned reliable breathe detectors, and license them via web commerce. A single smart guy could do it.
Alas, I'm not that guy. I suspect the guy will know something about FPGAs, assembly programming, and case design, perhaps coupling up with a web designer who's also a bit techy and a programmer who's a bit hardware-geeky. Toss in someone to oversee management -- which is to say specifically that the manager's job is to be the grease between the wheels: your job is to make damn sure everyone has what they need in order to get things done, and stand out of the way while they do it. Make sure the web guys are providing the 'geers with the knowledge resources they need to do their job, all the wikis and bugtrackers and forums and shit; make sure the hardware guy and software guy are on the same wavelength; make sure the engineers are dumping their brains into the databases so that we can exercise that information to make the next revision so fucking mindblowing we'll own the entire nation's breathe alcohol detector market. That's a whole lotta dough.
Go for it!
And might I remind the inventor that I truly believe we're on the cusp of destroying the earth. I don't hold much more than two generations before we must do something or be rendered extinct. I truly believe we're headed for a magnetic, climatic, and environmental flip-flop, and I think we may have accelerated a natural event with our polluting and destructive ways.
If this is the case, and this technology is essential to my survival (or the survival of my children's children), then it's going to be just as essential to the inventor's survival as well. It is in his best interests to be very fair in negotiating our price, because his ass is also on the line.
Hey, if their patent claims are truly unique, original ideas that it took some amount of ingenuity to invent, I'm all for them making a reasonable profit by their invention.
If it's something terrifically essential to my survival, I won't be held hostage to their greed. If it isn't that dire, then there'll be an agreeable, negotiable contract between us consumers and the inventor. No problem there.
I downloaded Firefox several times, but particularly after it hit 1.0 release status (the initial download and a couple of bug upgrades).
I've ended up staying with Opera. It's just much, much better in the end.
So can we have those stats updated to reflect that my downloads ended up being a waste of time? Just pretend I didn't do it, and we'll all be happier for it. I know I am!
...'cause the FCC is going to do everything it can to remain on the public's payroll. There's too much at stake for them -- to wit, all their jobs.
Kinda like the DEA: a complete and utter failure by every conceivable measure, yet they still suck bajillions of dollars out of the taxpayers' pockets.
No shit, eh?
There is a whole lot of the world that is not the USA. In fact, most of it.
Think about that for me. You'll figure out why ABC is irrelevant.
But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free?
Er... those of us without cable television? Who will never have cable television, because we absolutely refuse to pay to view commercials?
Quit.
Then release the app as your own product.
Artists, I promise you this: if you release your works in a DRM-free format, I promise that when I download and enjoy your work to the extent that I listen to it more than a few times, ie. it becomes a staple item in my collection, I will pay you for it.
This offer is not available to artists who are members of RIAA or CCRA.
Aural realism is more important. That's the one thing that has made the great games great: the use of audio cues and audio environment to enhance the gaming experience. From Doom through System Shock through Thief, it's always come down to audio, not photorealism.
Er, No, not necessary.
Here's how it works, Bob: you make it possible for me to very easily pay you a price I like and I won't pirate it. Because, you see, it's to my advantage to pay for it.
Basically, Bob, you're a hooker: you got something I want, I got something you want, and we gotta agree on a price.
Indeed, you're one of three hookers on this block. You lucked out: the only parking spot was around the corner, so you're the first hooker that's got something to offer. There's another hooker half-way down the block: she's the "reparatory" hooker. The one at the end of the block is the "blockbusters" hooker. And past the end and across the tracks is the "torrent" hooker. All the hookers on this block are looking pretty much the same, but within that range, you're definately the tops, Bob.
Now, Bob, you seem to think you're worth about twenty-five bucks. Because by the time I pay for my ticket and my wife's, we're getting into that range.
I want you to know the reparatory hooker only wants twelve bucks. I just have to walk down to her; not long, 'cause I'm not so overwhelming horny that I just gotta get blown right this second, Bob. And the blockbusters whore, why she's just four bucks -- but she'll blow me twice and I don't have to leave my house!
The torrent whore gives free blowjobs, but she's got ragged teeth and is pretty de-rezzed. I'm not such a cheap sumbitch that I'll go to her, Bob. I do pay for my movie entertainment.
Anyway, Bob, my point is this: you're an overpriced whore. I almost always rent the DVD; when I don't, I almost always end up at the reparatory. The last mainstream cinema showing I attended was Lord of the Rings. Exceptionally few films justify the first-print, top-rate quality, IMO.
So anyway, my point is this: so long as the free whore is skanky-looking, I'm not going to pirate: I'll take whatever reasonable cheap alternative provides me a home-system-quality experience. That experience is not going to be worth more than a DVD rental.
People at the office tend to avoid me. In fact, if I eat enough of the stuff (see above), even people whose noses are stuffed up with the flu tend to avoid me. Haven't had a cold in two years.
Most of us geeks accomplish it just by not showering.
Let me interpret that for you:
Our immunity against this disease sucks.
If we even have an immunity, that is.
Of course big pharma will make a lot of money.
So it's all okay.
Except that, of course, they can not manufacture it fast enough to contain an outbreak if an outbreak were to occur. It would spread quickly while they struggle to find enough material (chickens) to manufacture adequate amounts. You can't go from a few hundred to a few million vials overnight. The pox can.
(On a political note, the rich would be okay, because they'll be able to buy blackmarket anti-virals. The poor can be fucked, as always.)
Paul Thurrott reprinted the story without giving credit to the original source.
WTF?
Paul, please slap yourself for me. Now don't steal others' work again. Thanks.
And note that Tombaugh did not locate Planet X. He located Pluto, which is surely an amazing feat!, but he did not locate a planetary mass that accounted for the gravity signature of Planet X. To this day, Planet X eludes us.
AFAIK Pluto is by all rational logic *not* a planet. It is piddling small, for one: half the size of merely the USA. Its orbit is completely off-kilter from *every* other planet, both out-of-alignment with the solar plane and with an eccentric orbit that has it swinging inside the path of Uranus. And it isn't even one chunk of rock: it appears to be a couple of half-sized chunks in very close proximity to one another!
Pluto is a Kuiper object by all rational logic.
It's officially a planet due to politics: it's the first planet the US Americans discovered, and ego demands it retain its planetary status. D-oh! Dumb scientists.
It makes *NO* sense to mail MSWord documents except when *wanting them to be changed*, ie. shared writing or editing. Otherwise the document should be in some sort of secure format, even one as minimally secure as PDF. For the life of me, I can not understand why anyone would mail out sensitive information in a format that allows the recipient to easily and immediately change it to say whatever he wants.
Anyhoo, *PDF releases us from the MSWord noose* and that *is* important. It means much more acceptance for using other tools for generating documents.
I'll believe it when I see it, though. Microsoft *can not* afford to lose their iron grip over the Office market. They're going to fuxx0r PDF in some proprietary way, you just know it.
I daresay Apple could fully well step right into RIAA's territory and sign up artists for exclusive distribution. I know if I were choosing a rep, it'd be someone like Apple, which would very likely strike a win-win deal that enables me to make a good living as an artist; than someone like RIAA, which I know will do everything in its power to fuck me over and leave me indebted to them.
I should go find out what happened between Apple Computers and Apple Records. I'm a little surprised Apple is in the music business, given their original agreement with Apple Records was to stay well the hell out of anything that looked like music.
If Apple were smart enough to have just bought AR outright, they might very well already have a mechanism in place to support artists. And that, my friends, would be the start of the entertainment revolution: independents who can make a good solid living from their work.
Obviously, I don't play or watch baseball enough to make a good analogy! Sorry.
Will they swing again, or they gonna go for the easy bunt? Bases are loaded, tension is high... will this be the one that makes or breaks their game?
I think this may be where Google is going with their dark fibre network.
They can easily set up a seed node network that will ensure reasonable download times for any file. They can easily set up a peer node network that pays the peers to host files. They can offer a proprietary video format that inserts a single, targetted commercial to the video file you receive.
Google makes its money from the advertisers. It shares out some of that revenue with cooperative peers. It has control of seeds, to ensure quality of service. Hell, charge end-users a buck for the download, and reimburse it if they share 125% of it.
End-users get a television show with but a single commercial, and end-users have the opportunity to receive payment for hosting those torrents they really liked (or didn't like, but want to make money on).
It'd sure work for me. I have no problem dedicating a good chunk of drivespace and CPU time to torrenting my favourite shows, and would be especially co-operative if I made a few bucks off it.
Or, rather, I sure as hell hope there's no irony! I'm gonna be pissed if fifty years from now, the comet they pushed ends up smashing into Earth. That sorta shit can just ruin a fellow's day.