Wrong movie. Cyber warriors are like road warriors except the "road" is the information super-highway. Now, I know that's confusing because the Internets are more like tubes than like dumptrucks, but still, the Internet is exactly like a highway for information only superer.
So much as you'd expect, these cyber warriors will be riding around in cyber-cars (aka computers) trying to hoard cyber-gasoline, and perhaps trying to get revenge for their murdered cyber-wives. I know, it sounds funny, but you'd totally understand if you were a hacker who was familiar with cyberspace. The most important thing is to make sure all the T1s don't break through your firewalls and get access to your IP addresses.
If the issue is #1, then as someone else pointed out, it wouldn't be unthinkable to use OCR to detect which direction is up. I'd imagine that with today's computing power, if you can assume that the paperwork is being filed in typewritten English in a reasonable font, it'd be trivial to detect which direction was up.
If it's #2 or #3, then maybe they should consider building a system where a computer receives the fax, detects right-side-up, runs OCR, and stores it in a PDF. They can still print it if they want once that's all done.
Regardless of any particular case, it's true that we still don't understand human consciousness all that well. Also, I've read about some theories (only thing I could find with a quick Google search is here) that suggest that your brain and consciousness is not as unified as we tend to think.
According to some of these theories, for example, the reason people sometimes sleepwalk may be that enough of their brain is actually awake to perform certain tasks while other parts of their brain remain asleep. When you're really tired and feel a little disoriented, it may be that other parts of your brain are already asleep. One article I read even suggested that schizophrenia is really a form of severe sleep deprivation-- that there are parts of a schizophrenic's brain that basically *never* sleep even when the schizophrenic himself is asleep in conventional terms.
Similarly, as we all know, parts of the brain are highly specialized. That's why someone can, for example, have brain damage in the part of the brain that recognizes faces, and from then on out, they won't recognize anyone that they know. They might be otherwise completely normal, but a patient with damage in a certain part of the brain won't recognize his own mother.
And then along those lines, we all feel ambivalent sometimes. We want two different things. Addicts want to quit, but they don't quit. People believe two contradictory ideas at the same time. There's a theory that part of the reason these things happen is that it's literally two different parts of your brain fighting it out. Even though you think you're a single person, a unified consciousness, you actually have something like a small society of brain tissue that argues and makes power plays and even has peace-makers who try smooth things over between the warring parties, and your consciousness is the result of the interplay.
So given all that, I don't find it hard to believe that someone in a "vegetative state" might have some parts of their brain still operating. Depending on what exactly the damage is, it seems like you might have quite a lot of brain function left, while still not having enough to amount to what we'd consider a "conscious being".
Well I might argue that the people you're talking about weren't even "scientists" in the modern sense. What they practiced might be better described as natural philosophy. It's not as though Einstein was remembered for his lab experiments. Essentially his innovation was that he re-imagined what it meant to "measure" something.
Sometimes talking to people with very pro-sciene views, you get the idea that "science" is either an accumulated set of known facts or a perfect method which, because of peer review, is infallible at learning absolute truth.
In reality, it's just a set of processes that we've developed and which has been generally more successful at producing helpful results than other methods. No reason to think that the way we go about it couldn't be improved. I can't imagine that failing to share the results failed experiments doesn't sometimes result in the loss of important information.
Coincidentally I just saw this talk which raises the question whether helpful data can be gathered even if it's not gathered through conventional rigorous scientific methods. It seems like an interesting idea-- they're essentially gathering lots of data from various sources and using statistical analysis developed by economists to try to draw conclusions. My biggest concern would be purposeful manipulation by someone with an agenda.
But anyway, all of this is to say that this has gotten me thinking about how the scientific process may still be open to some innovation.
Personally I think that we should consider whether the government should be able to exercise eminent domain for patents in cases like this. The purpose of patents was to encourage people to invest in devising new technology, and so I don't think it's horrible to think the people behind the technology in H264 deserve to have their investment pay off to some degree. On the other hand, H264 being the defacto standard while being patent encumbered is an unacceptable situation.
most of video today consist of short snips on social websites of dancing cats filmed with a camera phone with crappy sensors and low quality MJPEG compression.
...and TV shows and movies.
Besides, have you seen the output from decent consumer-grade camcorders recently?
It's not the dominant cost (those would be marketing and distribution in most cases) but the marginal cost isn't zero or anywhere near zero.
Relative to what? If the list price of a best-seller book is $30, what percentage of that is actual materials and production costs of printing that book?
Not only that, but if publishers (music, text, movies, whatever) want to justify expensive prices by claiming that otherwise they can't recoup their investment, then it only follows that the price should drop to almost nothing once their costs are recouped. After all, distribution costs are dropping and production costs (of the actual copy) are zero.
But in fact, that's not how these prices are being set. They're not trying to drive up the prices to $15 to reflect the cost of producing the book; they want to increase the price because they think people will pay that price and they'll make more money. I'm not blaming them for it. That's just the reality. If these companies thought they could increase their overall profits by charging $200 per book, they'd do it.
Well but that's a question. Some people identify that "operating system" as essentially being the kernel. To some people, it's the kernel plus some other stuff. For others, it's everything that comes on the system when you install it, before you go looking for other applications. So are Fedora and Ubuntu the same OS? Are OSX and Darwin the same OS?
iPhone OS is certainly based on OSX, but I don't know off hand how much they stripped out. I know a lot of the normal Unix userland stuff is missing.
It's not the full desktop version, but it's basically the same codebase, stripped down to what they wanted for the iPhone, recompiled for a different CPU, and with a UI designed for a small touchscreen.
I guess it depends on where you draw the line on what's the "same operating system". How many modifications can I make to FreeBSD before you say it's not FreeBSD anymore? I don't know.
The other point is that for most applications, it's simply unnecessary to improve over the speed of modern wireless.
There's still video. IIRC, uncompressed 1080p/60 is roughly 3Gbps. Now you can still stream video without hitting 3Gbps, but then you theoretically lose quality and also you need more power to decompress the video stream on the other end.
Even ignoring the aspect of real-time streaming, people are buying/storing video at home, which even highly compressed can be several hundred megabytes per hour; if you want to copy those video files from one computer to another, you'll want some speed.
Well no doubt that there are other channels for pirated content other than bittorrent. I thought nweaver was disputing the claim that there was less music on bittorrent by claiming instead that mp3s were being traded over email instead. So I was disputing that by claiming never to have seen that.
Music is distributed through the "sneakernet" as well as a myriad of other Internet protocols-- but then so are movies, games, and porn, so that's not a sufficient explanation of the apparent low volume of music on bittorrent.
a) Music is not just DRM-free, its also SMALL. BitTorrent's strength is moving big files, while pirated songs are very small in comparison, you can just email em to your friends.
Do people email mp3s to their friends? If my friends did that, I think I'd be annoyed. Large file attachments are bad etiquette under most circumstances.
b) A lot of porn online is DRM free, so why so much porn in BitTorrent?
I can think of two reasons:
People don't necessarily trust their credit card information to random porn sites
People don't want porn showing up on their credit card bill
I agree that I'd like to see a more iron-clad case made. Like maybe offer a selection of movies for sale DRM-free, or maybe offer them on a site like Hulu (free, essentially DRM protected, ad supported). Control for variables and watch what happens to those movies' numbers in various pirate distribution channels.
I bet you'd find that in both cases, the illegitimate traffic drops significantly. It's not that "its because of DRM that people pirate stuff", but rather that people just want to watch a high-quality copy of a movie without any hassle, and if there's no way to do that, they'll turn to the method with the least amount of hassle. Paying any amount of money for content is a hassle, but for most people, it's less of a hassle than pirating. DRM is an even bigger hassle. For a certain percentage of people, paying+DRM is enough of a hassle to tip the scales.
I know it's happened to me more than a couple times where I've searched for "watch [show name] online", hoping to find a legal distribution channel. I couldn't find a legal distribution channel, but a bunch of other sites came up instead. Guess what happened.
I do not think you understand what a general purpose computer is.
I don't know what makes you say that, but I suspect that you don't understand what I was saying.
What makes a good general purpose computer isn't a specific set of input devices, but on the other hand limited input can limit the purposes for which you can use the computer. However good this touchscreen is, it's not going to be as immediately precise as a mouse-- at least not without additional UI innovation that allows the finger to become more precise. However good the touchscreen keyboard is, you won't type as quickly and easily because you can't touch-type.
So to rephrase: even if you can theoretically do any given computational task on the iPad or iPhone, you won't want to use them to do office tasks for 10 hours straight. You might want to use one of these things to read your dissertation or even take some notes for your dissertation, you won't want to use it to type your dissertation. Though you could use Brushes to create a nice little picture, professional graphic designers won't be able to replace their desktop/laptop computers with something of this form factor.
But even besides the small screen and lack of sufficient input devices, it's also probably not the most robust and super-powerful machine. By that, I don't mean to say, "This sucks because I can't play Crysis." I'm suggesting that this thing might only be responsive because it's running a stripped-down OS with purposefully limited capabilities, including a complete lack of multitasking. In the presentation, they talked about how it was a big challenge to create a version of iWork that would run well on this machine.
And then beyond the hardware limitations, the UI here isn't built for a full multi-tasking general-purpose computer. Like the hardware, the UI is built and optimized to do a limited set of things. They seem to be just beginning to develop a new UI vocabulary for multi-touch screens here.
So like I said, it's about as much a "general purpose computer" as the iPhone is. That's not to say that an iPhone isn't a general purpose computer-- you can do a lot with an iPhone-- but clearly you wouldn't want it to be your main day-to-day computer. Its design makes it unsuitable for the task.
The only new information going to the authoritative DNS server is my approximate location... So it's not like I'm giving away any new information.
I would also wonder how hard it would be to spoof the originating IP address for the purposes of the query. If it's done in a way that you're essentially volunteering your IP address and could claim a different IP at will, then the censorship of privacy concerns are at least diminished (though not erased completely).
Well I'm not sure, but I would guess that their digital voice is using something more efficient than TCPIP, and in addition they're compressing the hell out of the audio whereas a VoIP program might opt to use lesser compression. Beyond that, I don't know if there's something like different "channels" where they've set aside a certain portion of their bandwidth for voice and other portions for data, which means that using that not-using their voice service doesn't necessarily open up more bandwidth for data.
Well it competes with their voice and SMS offerings (where they make their money) while flooding their already overloaded data networks. Plus it diminishes the amount of control they have over their customers, since VoIP is completely portable, making cell networks just another point of entry to the Internet.
Right. If that happens, then I think cell providers will be well on their way to becoming dumb pipes. I'm sure they don't like the idea, but it's the right way to go.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong movie. Cyber warriors are like road warriors except the "road" is the information super-highway. Now, I know that's confusing because the Internets are more like tubes than like dumptrucks, but still, the Internet is exactly like a highway for information only superer.
So much as you'd expect, these cyber warriors will be riding around in cyber-cars (aka computers) trying to hoard cyber-gasoline, and perhaps trying to get revenge for their murdered cyber-wives. I know, it sounds funny, but you'd totally understand if you were a hacker who was familiar with cyberspace. The most important thing is to make sure all the T1s don't break through your firewalls and get access to your IP addresses.
If the issue is #1, then as someone else pointed out, it wouldn't be unthinkable to use OCR to detect which direction is up. I'd imagine that with today's computing power, if you can assume that the paperwork is being filed in typewritten English in a reasonable font, it'd be trivial to detect which direction was up.
If it's #2 or #3, then maybe they should consider building a system where a computer receives the fax, detects right-side-up, runs OCR, and stores it in a PDF. They can still print it if they want once that's all done.
Regardless of any particular case, it's true that we still don't understand human consciousness all that well. Also, I've read about some theories (only thing I could find with a quick Google search is here) that suggest that your brain and consciousness is not as unified as we tend to think.
According to some of these theories, for example, the reason people sometimes sleepwalk may be that enough of their brain is actually awake to perform certain tasks while other parts of their brain remain asleep. When you're really tired and feel a little disoriented, it may be that other parts of your brain are already asleep. One article I read even suggested that schizophrenia is really a form of severe sleep deprivation-- that there are parts of a schizophrenic's brain that basically *never* sleep even when the schizophrenic himself is asleep in conventional terms.
Similarly, as we all know, parts of the brain are highly specialized. That's why someone can, for example, have brain damage in the part of the brain that recognizes faces, and from then on out, they won't recognize anyone that they know. They might be otherwise completely normal, but a patient with damage in a certain part of the brain won't recognize his own mother.
And then along those lines, we all feel ambivalent sometimes. We want two different things. Addicts want to quit, but they don't quit. People believe two contradictory ideas at the same time. There's a theory that part of the reason these things happen is that it's literally two different parts of your brain fighting it out. Even though you think you're a single person, a unified consciousness, you actually have something like a small society of brain tissue that argues and makes power plays and even has peace-makers who try smooth things over between the warring parties, and your consciousness is the result of the interplay.
So given all that, I don't find it hard to believe that someone in a "vegetative state" might have some parts of their brain still operating. Depending on what exactly the damage is, it seems like you might have quite a lot of brain function left, while still not having enough to amount to what we'd consider a "conscious being".
It doesn't matter if he's right or not. His belief was not based on science.
Well how on earth is your belief supposed to be "based on science" when there isn't adequate scientific proof?
Well I might argue that the people you're talking about weren't even "scientists" in the modern sense. What they practiced might be better described as natural philosophy. It's not as though Einstein was remembered for his lab experiments. Essentially his innovation was that he re-imagined what it meant to "measure" something.
Sometimes talking to people with very pro-sciene views, you get the idea that "science" is either an accumulated set of known facts or a perfect method which, because of peer review, is infallible at learning absolute truth.
In reality, it's just a set of processes that we've developed and which has been generally more successful at producing helpful results than other methods. No reason to think that the way we go about it couldn't be improved. I can't imagine that failing to share the results failed experiments doesn't sometimes result in the loss of important information.
Coincidentally I just saw this talk which raises the question whether helpful data can be gathered even if it's not gathered through conventional rigorous scientific methods. It seems like an interesting idea-- they're essentially gathering lots of data from various sources and using statistical analysis developed by economists to try to draw conclusions. My biggest concern would be purposeful manipulation by someone with an agenda.
But anyway, all of this is to say that this has gotten me thinking about how the scientific process may still be open to some innovation.
Personally I think that we should consider whether the government should be able to exercise eminent domain for patents in cases like this. The purpose of patents was to encourage people to invest in devising new technology, and so I don't think it's horrible to think the people behind the technology in H264 deserve to have their investment pay off to some degree. On the other hand, H264 being the defacto standard while being patent encumbered is an unacceptable situation.
...Plus who knows how many other closed platforms.
It's not really about "closed platforms". iPhone/iPads have hardware for decoding h264. They don't have hardware support for Theora.
He also talks about "cracking" games that have no DRM. I don't think we're dealing with a rocket surgeon here.
most of video today consist of short snips on social websites of dancing cats filmed with a camera phone with crappy sensors and low quality MJPEG compression.
...and TV shows and movies.
Besides, have you seen the output from decent consumer-grade camcorders recently?
It's not the dominant cost (those would be marketing and distribution in most cases) but the marginal cost isn't zero or anywhere near zero.
Relative to what? If the list price of a best-seller book is $30, what percentage of that is actual materials and production costs of printing that book?
Not only that, but if publishers (music, text, movies, whatever) want to justify expensive prices by claiming that otherwise they can't recoup their investment, then it only follows that the price should drop to almost nothing once their costs are recouped. After all, distribution costs are dropping and production costs (of the actual copy) are zero.
But in fact, that's not how these prices are being set. They're not trying to drive up the prices to $15 to reflect the cost of producing the book; they want to increase the price because they think people will pay that price and they'll make more money. I'm not blaming them for it. That's just the reality. If these companies thought they could increase their overall profits by charging $200 per book, they'd do it.
The GUI is just another program
Well but that's a question. Some people identify that "operating system" as essentially being the kernel. To some people, it's the kernel plus some other stuff. For others, it's everything that comes on the system when you install it, before you go looking for other applications. So are Fedora and Ubuntu the same OS? Are OSX and Darwin the same OS?
iPhone OS is certainly based on OSX, but I don't know off hand how much they stripped out. I know a lot of the normal Unix userland stuff is missing.
It's not the full desktop version, but it's basically the same codebase, stripped down to what they wanted for the iPhone, recompiled for a different CPU, and with a UI designed for a small touchscreen.
I guess it depends on where you draw the line on what's the "same operating system". How many modifications can I make to FreeBSD before you say it's not FreeBSD anymore? I don't know.
The other point is that for most applications, it's simply unnecessary to improve over the speed of modern wireless.
There's still video. IIRC, uncompressed 1080p/60 is roughly 3Gbps. Now you can still stream video without hitting 3Gbps, but then you theoretically lose quality and also you need more power to decompress the video stream on the other end.
Even ignoring the aspect of real-time streaming, people are buying/storing video at home, which even highly compressed can be several hundred megabytes per hour; if you want to copy those video files from one computer to another, you'll want some speed.
Well no doubt that there are other channels for pirated content other than bittorrent. I thought nweaver was disputing the claim that there was less music on bittorrent by claiming instead that mp3s were being traded over email instead. So I was disputing that by claiming never to have seen that.
Music is distributed through the "sneakernet" as well as a myriad of other Internet protocols-- but then so are movies, games, and porn, so that's not a sufficient explanation of the apparent low volume of music on bittorrent.
How could copyright "piracy" have been occurring before the notion of copyright itself? Before copyright, it was simply legal to copy books.
a) Music is not just DRM-free, its also SMALL. BitTorrent's strength is moving big files, while pirated songs are very small in comparison, you can just email em to your friends.
Do people email mp3s to their friends? If my friends did that, I think I'd be annoyed. Large file attachments are bad etiquette under most circumstances.
b) A lot of porn online is DRM free, so why so much porn in BitTorrent?
I can think of two reasons:
I agree that I'd like to see a more iron-clad case made. Like maybe offer a selection of movies for sale DRM-free, or maybe offer them on a site like Hulu (free, essentially DRM protected, ad supported). Control for variables and watch what happens to those movies' numbers in various pirate distribution channels.
I bet you'd find that in both cases, the illegitimate traffic drops significantly. It's not that "its because of DRM that people pirate stuff", but rather that people just want to watch a high-quality copy of a movie without any hassle, and if there's no way to do that, they'll turn to the method with the least amount of hassle. Paying any amount of money for content is a hassle, but for most people, it's less of a hassle than pirating. DRM is an even bigger hassle. For a certain percentage of people, paying+DRM is enough of a hassle to tip the scales.
I know it's happened to me more than a couple times where I've searched for "watch [show name] online", hoping to find a legal distribution channel. I couldn't find a legal distribution channel, but a bunch of other sites came up instead. Guess what happened.
At 20cm the average person WILL move their hand/watch past the authentication range. Will they need re-authentication.
Especially since, conventionally, if you're right handed you wear your watch on your left wrist.
I do not think you understand what a general purpose computer is.
I don't know what makes you say that, but I suspect that you don't understand what I was saying.
What makes a good general purpose computer isn't a specific set of input devices, but on the other hand limited input can limit the purposes for which you can use the computer. However good this touchscreen is, it's not going to be as immediately precise as a mouse-- at least not without additional UI innovation that allows the finger to become more precise. However good the touchscreen keyboard is, you won't type as quickly and easily because you can't touch-type.
So to rephrase: even if you can theoretically do any given computational task on the iPad or iPhone, you won't want to use them to do office tasks for 10 hours straight. You might want to use one of these things to read your dissertation or even take some notes for your dissertation, you won't want to use it to type your dissertation. Though you could use Brushes to create a nice little picture, professional graphic designers won't be able to replace their desktop/laptop computers with something of this form factor.
But even besides the small screen and lack of sufficient input devices, it's also probably not the most robust and super-powerful machine. By that, I don't mean to say, "This sucks because I can't play Crysis." I'm suggesting that this thing might only be responsive because it's running a stripped-down OS with purposefully limited capabilities, including a complete lack of multitasking. In the presentation, they talked about how it was a big challenge to create a version of iWork that would run well on this machine.
And then beyond the hardware limitations, the UI here isn't built for a full multi-tasking general-purpose computer. Like the hardware, the UI is built and optimized to do a limited set of things. They seem to be just beginning to develop a new UI vocabulary for multi-touch screens here.
So like I said, it's about as much a "general purpose computer" as the iPhone is. That's not to say that an iPhone isn't a general purpose computer-- you can do a lot with an iPhone-- but clearly you wouldn't want it to be your main day-to-day computer. Its design makes it unsuitable for the task.
I didn't know that. Will tethering be free? Can you cite your source? (not because I doubt you, but because I'd like details)
The only new information going to the authoritative DNS server is my approximate location... So it's not like I'm giving away any new information.
I would also wonder how hard it would be to spoof the originating IP address for the purposes of the query. If it's done in a way that you're essentially volunteering your IP address and could claim a different IP at will, then the censorship of privacy concerns are at least diminished (though not erased completely).
Well I'm not sure, but I would guess that their digital voice is using something more efficient than TCPIP, and in addition they're compressing the hell out of the audio whereas a VoIP program might opt to use lesser compression. Beyond that, I don't know if there's something like different "channels" where they've set aside a certain portion of their bandwidth for voice and other portions for data, which means that using that not-using their voice service doesn't necessarily open up more bandwidth for data.
Well it competes with their voice and SMS offerings (where they make their money) while flooding their already overloaded data networks. Plus it diminishes the amount of control they have over their customers, since VoIP is completely portable, making cell networks just another point of entry to the Internet.
Right. If that happens, then I think cell providers will be well on their way to becoming dumb pipes. I'm sure they don't like the idea, but it's the right way to go.