Copyrights, like patents, imply an exclusive right. What is lost is the exclusiveness of their right to copy. In theory they have no profit margin without this exclusivity, and without a profit margin they can not justify taking risks by producing new music.
In practice, as long as nobody else is allowed to market the music for profit, the copyright holder is still the only person selling a legitimate collector's item. As a result, he will still have a profit margin even with P2P downloads, for much the same reason that Star Wars still sells merchandise after airing their show on television for anybody to record with a VCR.
It can be argued that allowing non-commercial reproduction increases the profits for the industry because their music get wider exposure and people will buy more of their collector's items. However, if that was really the case then any one of the music recording companies could in theory increase their market share by setting-up a server to allow free downloads of their own music. Since they are not doing this despite a profit motive, it can be reasonably assumed that their market research does not support this reasoning. For somebody to use this argument to rationalize their own actions is presumptuous.
It was known how to make static 3-D holograms with a laser before lasers were invented. 3-D television is a whole different matter.
If I understand correctly, there is no fundamental difference between 2-D and 3-D holograms except for computer processing time. So if they can make a projector that uses 2-D holograms, they should also be able to make a projector that uses 3-D holograms.
I would really like to see something on how the hardware works, and the algorithm for generating the interference pattern of the 2-D hologram, so that I can see exactly what are the hurdles in making 3-D moving images.
If this is the first time anybody has played a Quake 3 deathmatch, then how did they debug the deathmatch mode? Are they just sending an untested executable to the tournament?
And if somebody has tested it, are they barred from the tournament? I would hate to play deathmatch tournament against the programmers and the in-house game testers when I haven't ever played the game myself. That would not be a fair game. Knowledge of weapons properties, familiarity with the map, and general game play familiarity are all important factors.
I have seen map familiarity become an overwhelming factor in capture-the-flag battles between opposing clans. When the second set of counter-strike maps were released, [USC] (or was it [UCLA]?) practiced on them before inviting [CIT] to play on their server. [CIT] got wasted for a couple hours before they adapted. Then [CIT] creamed them as usual. (Yes, these 'clans' are universities.)
So if you had the necessary computing power, could you make a 3-D image the same way? I mean, is it now technologically feasible to make pixels small enough and compact enough to make a changing 3-D holographic image?
You make a good point about the age issue. There should be on-line gaming servers that require proof of age and bar people under 18, or 21, or some other threshold. I suppose that's nearly impossible since some kid could always get his parents to sign up and then play under their account.
Brainstorming more creative solution...
Use an AI moderator to check for maturity level and automaticly divide players into two groups, and invisibly separate them. If they don't know they are being moderated, they won't even try to get around it and annoy us. And if some parent lets his kids play under his account, he will pay the consequences next time he plays and finds himself grouped with the kids.
We should put a bunch og different telescope in the Sun-Earth Lagrange/libration point located away from the Sun from the Earth. The low (and eaily detectable) gravitational perturbations there, combined with the possibility of creating semi-permanent shielding from both Solar and Terrestrial radiation, with a close proximity to the Earth and relatively stationary position, all add up to one really good telescope location. You can also orbit this point in many different ways, allowing for lots of different telescopes. Then there is also the advantages of putting a space station there...
Self-respecting geeks don't work for Microsoft. That doesn't mean they aren't real, anymore than prostitutes aren't women. (Forgive the almost double negative.)
Microsoft would just buy the bars and change the management. Or make their own bars. Billy Boy Gates of Hell is the richest man in Seattle. He can pretty much do what he wants. He just might buy the Space Needle and surrounding amusemement park rides and make it a private club for Microsoft employees and their families. Maybe move it closer to corporate headquarters too. You never can tell with these multi-billionaires.
Why does he have Japan and UK in the list but not on the map? The map makes the US look worse in comparison than it really is because it doesn't include these other industrialized countries with more expensive internet cafes.
Anyway, there is free wifi in many places around the U.S., which makes it even more deceptive. Where I live (Olympia, WA), at any given time there is probably far more people using free wifi with their laptops (sometimes free electricity as well) than are using a desktop computer at an internet cafe. A few people pay to use the sevice at Starbucks, because it is less crowded and has easier access to electric outlets, or because they just like Starbucks. But even that is cheaper, I think.
So basicly what is driving the price of the internet cafe around here is the high start-up cost combined with small number of clients. That requires that they must charge the occasional client much more to pay for all the time that the computer is not being used.
If they are manufactured in the US primarily, but packaged in other countries, but you have an export tax... then every one of these things gets taxed... unless you move the packaging for your domestic market (at least) to a domestic factory. Basicly, the companies either have to pay the export tax, or creat more jobs in the US (which also generates tax revenue). Unfortunately, in the long run this might move more chip manufacturing to Israel. But, hey, Israel needs to become more self-sufficient in weapons manufacturing so that they will be less reliant on US foreign aid. So even this helps conserve US tax dollars.
But seriously, since when did we have export fees on weapons? I thought you were able to move land mines to third world countries without much difficuty. Exporting weapons offsets (or, rather, drives) our excessive investment in military technology, so the powers-that-be have traditionally made it absurbdly easy to do.
It was designed to last only 30 years. Obviously if they allocated the number more efficiently you wouldn't run out, but the guys who designed it don't care because now they have to be hired out of retirement as consultants (or at the very least that was their intention). They are comparing this to Y2K not because it is that bad, but because the people who orchestrated the crisis want to prep their potential customers, to get them used to the idea of paying outrageous fees for an overhaul, regardless of how dificult (or, rather, easy) the fix turns out to be.
I thought this might be be something for use with 3-D monitors/glasses. Disappointing. I don't have the slightest idea why this might be useful for anything more than the novelty value.
Vote against this administration. The reason they are doing this is that revealing the information would loose votes for the current administration. In order to balance the scales of democracy and make the election more fair, everybody who reads this article should vote against Bush. Because this administration has already admitted by its actions that it is corrupt.
I'm sure the party leaders will pirate. However, I very much doubt that they will do a sophisticate cost/bennefit analysis. The Party leaders are in a position where they are allowed to ignore consequences because they have authority over the whole country with no checks and balances. All they have to do is decide not to enforce copyright laws, or only enforce them in a particular, limited, formulaic way as a token, and piracy is a done deal. For similare reasons, Microsoft will be extremely vulnerable to corporate espionage since the Party Leaders stand to bennefit from it. It is possible that the Party Leaders value their relationship with Microsoft enough to maintain the relationship for a while, but eventually the situation will degenerate once they are satisfied with the teechnology they have acquired and decide to become self-sufficient.
I don't think that Microsoft will last very long in China after the party members are subjected to the blue screen of death a few times. The Party leaders will also want to back-stab Microsoft at every turn, which means Microsoft will want out as well. Expect this marriage to end in divorce.
The reason they didn't teach the original "hackers" ethics in the first place is quite simple: If they had, some of these hackers would have realized how corrupt the system is - the system that the feds protect - and may have gone about undermining the system in some ingenious but ethical manner. And the last thing the feds want is _ethical_ civil disobedience. I mean, you can have a war on crime, or a war in terrorism, but a war on creative ethical civil disobedience!?!? No, they couldn't fight such a thing publicly without creating a public back lash, so better to stop its creation in the first place via poor education, misinformation, and stereotyping.
You could just as well use a grid search algorithm for this. After all, you basicly have a function of so many variables that returns a real number (lap time), and you want to minimize this function.
After doing a grid search, and saving your data, you could try some multi-variable calculus curve fitting and get a pretty good idea of where the local/global minima are likely to be. This way, you don't just have a unique solution, a single example of a fast car, but rather a theory in the form of an equation which can be empirically tested at many points to determine if your model is correct. Then you can tweak the model/equation based on empirical results, and do some simple multi-variable calculus to fit the real-world optimized solution.
One thing genetic algorithms are useful for is ever-chaning environments, where there is no unique solution and there are trade-offs between robustness in general and optimization for the momentary environment. In this case the GA allows you to continuously evolve as you go through various environments so that you (hopefully) end up with both good performance and excellent robustness, and possibly also find and record various different specialized species for different environments. Games of chance, such as poker or multiplayer xpuyopuyo against imperfect opponents is one example of this.
GA's are also useful when the design can not be reduced to a fixed number of real number variables, but rather is open-ended in terms of complexity.
Notice that living organisms satisfy both of these categories.
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In practice, as long as nobody else is allowed to market the music for profit, the copyright holder is still the only person selling a legitimate collector's item. As a result, he will still have a profit margin even with P2P downloads, for much the same reason that Star Wars still sells merchandise after airing their show on television for anybody to record with a VCR.
It can be argued that allowing non-commercial reproduction increases the profits for the industry because their music get wider exposure and people will buy more of their collector's items. However, if that was really the case then any one of the music recording companies could in theory increase their market share by setting-up a server to allow free downloads of their own music. Since they are not doing this despite a profit motive, it can be reasonably assumed that their market research does not support this reasoning. For somebody to use this argument to rationalize their own actions is presumptuous.
If I understand correctly, there is no fundamental difference between 2-D and 3-D holograms except for computer processing time. So if they can make a projector that uses 2-D holograms, they should also be able to make a projector that uses 3-D holograms.
I would really like to see something on how the hardware works, and the algorithm for generating the interference pattern of the 2-D hologram, so that I can see exactly what are the hurdles in making 3-D moving images.
It's deliberate double-speak to emphasize the sarcasm in the rest of the article. I like it.
Woops, I meant Doom 3. Gotta watch those typos.
And if somebody has tested it, are they barred from the tournament? I would hate to play deathmatch tournament against the programmers and the in-house game testers when I haven't ever played the game myself. That would not be a fair game. Knowledge of weapons properties, familiarity with the map, and general game play familiarity are all important factors.
I have seen map familiarity become an overwhelming factor in capture-the-flag battles between opposing clans. When the second set of counter-strike maps were released, [USC] (or was it [UCLA]?) practiced on them before inviting [CIT] to play on their server. [CIT] got wasted for a couple hours before they adapted. Then [CIT] creamed them as usual. (Yes, these 'clans' are universities.)
So if you had the necessary computing power, could you make a 3-D image the same way? I mean, is it now technologically feasible to make pixels small enough and compact enough to make a changing 3-D holographic image?
What is a 2-D hologram?? I thought holograms were inherently 3-D, although they may sometimes be images of impossible objects.
Brainstorming more creative solution...
Use an AI moderator to check for maturity level and automaticly divide players into two groups, and invisibly separate them. If they don't know they are being moderated, they won't even try to get around it and annoy us. And if some parent lets his kids play under his account, he will pay the consequences next time he plays and finds himself grouped with the kids.
We should put a bunch og different telescope in the Sun-Earth Lagrange/libration point located away from the Sun from the Earth. The low (and eaily detectable) gravitational perturbations there, combined with the possibility of creating semi-permanent shielding from both Solar and Terrestrial radiation, with a close proximity to the Earth and relatively stationary position, all add up to one really good telescope location. You can also orbit this point in many different ways, allowing for lots of different telescopes. Then there is also the advantages of putting a space station there...
Count me in! I want a piece of Microsoft! Are there any lawyers who read slashdot?
Self-respecting geeks don't work for Microsoft. That doesn't mean they aren't real, anymore than prostitutes aren't women. (Forgive the almost double negative.)
Microsoft would just buy the bars and change the management. Or make their own bars. Billy Boy Gates of Hell is the richest man in Seattle. He can pretty much do what he wants. He just might buy the Space Needle and surrounding amusemement park rides and make it a private club for Microsoft employees and their families. Maybe move it closer to corporate headquarters too. You never can tell with these multi-billionaires.
Does he mean that they will take open source software and modify it to meet their needs, or that they will make their own software open source?
Who will have access to the source, the general public, or just those with a "need to know".
Why does he have Japan and UK in the list but not on the map? The map makes the US look worse in comparison than it really is because it doesn't include these other industrialized countries with more expensive internet cafes.
Anyway, there is free wifi in many places around the U.S., which makes it even more deceptive. Where I live (Olympia, WA), at any given time there is probably far more people using free wifi with their laptops (sometimes free electricity as well) than are using a desktop computer at an internet cafe. A few people pay to use the sevice at Starbucks, because it is less crowded and has easier access to electric outlets, or because they just like Starbucks. But even that is cheaper, I think.
So basicly what is driving the price of the internet cafe around here is the high start-up cost combined with small number of clients. That requires that they must charge the occasional client much more to pay for all the time that the computer is not being used.
Better yet, find out your state's testing procedure. Or test it, then either go with an increment that works well, or sue their sox off. Your choice.
If they are manufactured in the US primarily, but packaged in other countries, but you have an export tax... then every one of these things gets taxed... unless you move the packaging for your domestic market (at least) to a domestic factory. Basicly, the companies either have to pay the export tax, or creat more jobs in the US (which also generates tax revenue). Unfortunately, in the long run this might move more chip manufacturing to Israel. But, hey, Israel needs to become more self-sufficient in weapons manufacturing so that they will be less reliant on US foreign aid. So even this helps conserve US tax dollars. But seriously, since when did we have export fees on weapons? I thought you were able to move land mines to third world countries without much difficuty. Exporting weapons offsets (or, rather, drives) our excessive investment in military technology, so the powers-that-be have traditionally made it absurbdly easy to do.
It was designed to last only 30 years. Obviously if they allocated the number more efficiently you wouldn't run out, but the guys who designed it don't care because now they have to be hired out of retirement as consultants (or at the very least that was their intention). They are comparing this to Y2K not because it is that bad, but because the people who orchestrated the crisis want to prep their potential customers, to get them used to the idea of paying outrageous fees for an overhaul, regardless of how dificult (or, rather, easy) the fix turns out to be.
Generating a planetary magnetic field should be a high priority in terraforming.
I thought this might be be something for use with 3-D monitors/glasses. Disappointing. I don't have the slightest idea why this might be useful for anything more than the novelty value.
I couldn't get it to work. If only a bunch of extremely sophisticated computer techs can figure out how to use it, then its not very scalable.
Vote against this administration. The reason they are doing this is that revealing the information would loose votes for the current administration. In order to balance the scales of democracy and make the election more fair, everybody who reads this article should vote against Bush. Because this administration has already admitted by its actions that it is corrupt.
I'm sure the party leaders will pirate. However, I very much doubt that they will do a sophisticate cost/bennefit analysis. The Party leaders are in a position where they are allowed to ignore consequences because they have authority over the whole country with no checks and balances. All they have to do is decide not to enforce copyright laws, or only enforce them in a particular, limited, formulaic way as a token, and piracy is a done deal. For similare reasons, Microsoft will be extremely vulnerable to corporate espionage since the Party Leaders stand to bennefit from it. It is possible that the Party Leaders value their relationship with Microsoft enough to maintain the relationship for a while, but eventually the situation will degenerate once they are satisfied with the teechnology they have acquired and decide to become self-sufficient.
I don't think that Microsoft will last very long in China after the party members are subjected to the blue screen of death a few times. The Party leaders will also want to back-stab Microsoft at every turn, which means Microsoft will want out as well. Expect this marriage to end in divorce.
The reason they didn't teach the original "hackers" ethics in the first place is quite simple: If they had, some of these hackers would have realized how corrupt the system is - the system that the feds protect - and may have gone about undermining the system in some ingenious but ethical manner. And the last thing the feds want is _ethical_ civil disobedience. I mean, you can have a war on crime, or a war in terrorism, but a war on creative ethical civil disobedience!?!? No, they couldn't fight such a thing publicly without creating a public back lash, so better to stop its creation in the first place via poor education, misinformation, and stereotyping.
You could just as well use a grid search algorithm for this. After all, you basicly have a function of so many variables that returns a real number (lap time), and you want to minimize this function.
After doing a grid search, and saving your data, you could try some multi-variable calculus curve fitting and get a pretty good idea of where the local/global minima are likely to be. This way, you don't just have a unique solution, a single example of a fast car, but rather a theory in the form of an equation which can be empirically tested at many points to determine if your model is correct. Then you can tweak the model/equation based on empirical results, and do some simple multi-variable calculus to fit the real-world optimized solution.
One thing genetic algorithms are useful for is ever-chaning environments, where there is no unique solution and there are trade-offs between robustness in general and optimization for the momentary environment. In this case the GA allows you to continuously evolve as you go through various environments so that you (hopefully) end up with both good performance and excellent robustness, and possibly also find and record various different specialized species for different environments. Games of chance, such as poker or multiplayer xpuyopuyo against imperfect opponents is one example of this.
GA's are also useful when the design can not be reduced to a fixed number of real number variables, but rather is open-ended in terms of complexity.
Notice that living organisms satisfy both of these categories.