That's because they'd integrate it with a product that you already have, change the terms of service and force a mandatory update. Whereas with the Google product it's a software addon to your computer experince and you have to go download it yourself. It doesn't come preinstalled on 90% of computers.
An interesting idea, but wouldn't it be better to just have a home battery backup system, like your computer does? Not something that'll let you live off grid, just something that'll keep your home going for 30-60 minutes, on average. Then you don't have to overcool your fridge before the grid has issues and let it warm up when there are issues. Same goes for heating (electric dryers, stoves, etc) and lights.
One of these proposed sensors, several car batteries (or similar) and an inverter. Charge the batteries from the grid when things are fine (4am?) and temporarily run off battery power when the grid has issues (peak of the day?). Much cheaper then refitting all your appliances or a whole solar setup for the home. However, if you wanted to add solar panels later it'd be trival.
Electrolyzing water is short sighted because it's ineffeicent? The city of Los Angeles owns several coal power plants outside of California. One of those is a 1.6GW plant in central Utah. They ran wires 480-some miles to LA at about a 40% loss in electricial energy. This provides roughly 25% of LA's power, if I remember correctly. This is seems more "short sighted".
As far as solar plants being for "tree huggers" I suggest you look into "solar concentrators" (as opposed to photovoltaics: solar panels). These use mirrors to concentrate the light onto one spot that is typically filled with an oil or salt mixture. This in turn is stored in large tanks and as needed used to heat water to steam. From there the rest of the plant works like a coal or nuclear power plant. Beyond having no pollution (not even thermal, as the heat was collected, not created), there is no input fuel with a volitale price (example: oil in the past 2 years). The only disadvantage is like all power plants it's costly to start up. However, place one or several in Neveda or Arizona, near the gulf of California and you have a Very sunny region near lots of water. The price of electrolysis could drop to zero if the system (physical and economic) were well designed. Meaning that excess heat gathered and not sold as electricity could be converted to hydrogen fuel.
Summary: Conversion would be very pricey. However the payoff is a long term stable solution: stable for poltics, the enviroment and economy. Fewer-->No forgein conflicts over fuel, much less pollution (cars and power plants), and more homegrown jobs (to offset jobs lost due to fewer oil refinaries).
consider that most of the california electricity is generated by burning natural gas
Not quite true. Intermountain Power Agency (picture)is one of three 1600MW coal generators for California that is out of state. This one is in central Utah, the other two are in Laughlin, Nevada (Mohave Generation Station) and someplace in Arizona. (I've heard SoCal Edison sold its interest in the NV and AZ ones though, haven't confirmed yet.) Unfortunately IPA power plant is close enough to Arches, Bryce and Zion's national park to be causing significant pollution. After growing up in Los Angeles and now living in Salt Lake I've begun to realize how much LA residents take for granted. It's not in their backyard anymore so it's no big deal.
The simple solution is to build a large solar setup (not photovolatics, solar concentrators like the Power Tower near Barstow, CA) out past Palmdale. Given the desert conditions, the proximity to the energy destination (SoCal) and the promimenty to Lockheed and Boeing Skunk and Phantom -works (who would be constructing many of the pieces) how does anyone lose?
As far as the car fuel issue goes, I recomend hydrogen. Initially, it sounded like a bad idea to me but I've looked more into it and specifically how it's created. Stan Ovshinsky (inventor of the NiMH battery) has been continuing his work on storing hydrogen in solid metals (no compressed gas tanks) as well as developing good solar cells. Cells that are as flexible as a vinyl mat and very durable. He's demoed using a mat of this stuff with 12 holes punched in it powering a radio. The cells were actually pretty damaged and worked great. They're looking in to making roof shingles out of it. This would be good as the mat already looked pretty much like roof shingles. You could use the sunlight on your roof to create hydrogen from water (at home) and fill up your car.
It would take a lot to switch over but it took a lot to get the gas station / oil distribution system we have now. Much of the so called "hyrdogen economy" could reuse the existing system. There is no techincal reason why a gas station couldn't create hyrdogen on location rather then having it driven in daily.
In addition, many coal plants are cleaning up. Much of the smoke is now caught and "scrubbed". Most of the particulates are used to create cement now rather then smog. Several companies are using the smoke and its heat to grow algae on site which is then turned into other fuel. Once most coal plants are doing both of the above the pollution from them will be very minimal. I'd still prefer to see as much renewable energy as possible, mostly solar (with the new techs developed in the past 5 years, not the clunky things from the 1970s) but this is a good move in the right direction.
Paid? I was under the impression that Rob isn't all that in charge of Slashdot any more (since its sale). I also thought he has been employed working on stuff other then Slashdot in recent years. Just look at how often he posts versus Timothy, Michael or Zonk. Aren't (weren't) most of the editors just friends of his like Hemos, sengan and justin++. He started this as a hobby and something fun, it grew into a great community but now it's turned into some other beast. Small wonder he gets pissed when he gets tons of hatemail everytime something small goes wrong. Hopefully he won't pull a Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) and disappear after he's done here. I would like to see the next great thing he creates and I doubt hate mail will help.
But working for Bill Gates' company is not a natural human right, so what is objectionable about this? Just because he is wealthy (and he's a self-made man, remember), those 800 people suddenly have control over his finances?
Two things, first, William H. Gates III is completely self made? Ok. Sounds odd, but I'll let other's google this one.
Second: You are right, no one has a right to a particular job. However, rarely has threatening to take something away if criteria X is not met been considering a good bargining / trading tactic. Instead, the reverse, offering to do something for someone if criteria X is met has always been used.
For example: If you give me that house I'll give $100,000. That sounds like a normal deal. Whereas, saying "If you support this thing I don't want (i.e. software patents), I'll lay off 800 of your citizens" doesn't sounds like or represent normal business / trade activities. It sounds more along the lines of "Pay may $100 'insurance' to make sure your knees don't get broken." Although not as overtly illegal, it's the same tactic, and no one likes it being done to them.
I don't think so. We now have image recognition software and speech input for the computer. Neither are very advanced but both work. With some clever code a program could be written to identify videos and even place them in context. Add in logic and a database to keep track of what's been "learned" and you'd have the beginings of videos.google.com. This is the kind of interesting project I envision Google PhD's working on, on that weekly free day of theirs. If any one does end up doing this I expect it'll be a few years before we see any good products. Common computers have only just gotten to the point where video editing/playing/etc can be done quick enough (from a human perspective) to be worthwhile. Note that none of what I'm suggesting would require development of revolutionairy new software, just integrating a few things that are already there, followed by the standard incremental improvement process all software goes through.
We may not know much about drinking but we know LOTS about shitty driving. If you drive here watch out for the idiots that decide to make a right turn AFTER they've moved into the left turn lane.
Not sure about soon. I think their next major conference is in August. My predictions are that they'll announce a fully 64 bit OS that dynamically runs 32bit programs as 64bit, a G5 mini and G5 Powerbooks. Oh yeah, and 3.0GHz G5's or the performance equivlents. Nothing with the iPod though, other then to mention its succuess. This is just speculation on my part based off of what I've read here and seen Apple do in the past. Should be a good year. My other prediciton is that in 2006 they'll have 10+% marketshare and Cell based Macs. =) Just some ideas.
If the tax rate is below a certain point, cutting taxes decreases revenue. If the tax rate is above a certain point, cutting taxes increases revenue.
Sounds like a reasonable example of first and second order derivatives. Now I know a real world use for the Calculus that I took with my Computer Science degree.
Article states Apple has 80% of the market. Other numbers I've heard recently have put it in the 60%-70% range. How is this a monopoly? They don't have complete control. Also they are not the only source of music or portable hard drives. They are the most popular but I don't know of any exclusive agreements they have that prevent other people from selling music online or prevent other people from making hard drive music players.
I use my iPod daily but have yet to use the iTMS. Also, if I wanted a different player I know of two popular ones (Creative Nomad series and the iRiver players) and many less popular ones. Apple has risen to the top here because they make a product that people like, not because they are excerting their domaince to maintain their position. In their main market of computers Apple has somewhere between 1% and 4% of the market. What monopoly do they have to leverage iPod?
This is basically what Gobo Linux is trying to accomplish. From their FAQ:
GoboLinux is a Linux distribution that breaks with the historical Unix directory hierarchy. Basically, this means that there are no directories such as/usr and/etc. The main idea of the alternative hierarchy is to store all files belonging to an application in its own separate subtree; therefore we have directories such as/Programs/GCC/2.95.3/lib.
To allow the system to find these files, they are logically grouped in directories such as/System/Links/Executables, which, you guessed it, contains symbolic links to all executable files inside the Programs hierarchy.
To maintain backwards compatibility with traditional Unix/Linux apps, there are symbolic links that mimic the Unix tree, such as "/usr/bin ->/System/Links/Executables", and "/sbin ->/System/Links/Executables" (this example shows that arbitrary differentiations between files of the same category were also removed).
Firefox and Thunderbird have some great features, notably extensions. Why not write an extension to Thunderbird for spam. Ideally this extension would add a button to your email next to the "Mark As Spam" button that would:
Open a new Firefox browser and minimize it
Open 10 tabs (or 'X' tabs, user configurable)
Open the first link in the email in each tab
Repeat steps 1-3 for each link
Then I could use the filtering advantages of Thunderbird to target the people who target me. Perhaps one could even make it a menu option to open all the links in all the messages in your inbox, marked as spam, 10 times in a background Firefox.
It's not distributed, it's me taking them up on their offer. And since it'll happen when I check my email it shouldn't have the characteristics of a DOS/DDOS. When I'm done I just close a a window. I mean, I'm not really using my bandwidth when I'm sitting there reading my email, and wasting their bandwidth while filtering my email will give me a lot more satisfaction then merely deleting the email.
We could also develop better policies concerning nuclear fuel. When I last looked into it (please correct me if anything has changed) I found that nuclear fuel rods were considered "waste" when they reached about 3% of use. Rather then refining the remaining material and reusing the useful material we dub it "waste" and bury it. The rational I found for this was that once it reaches about 3% or so there is enough plutonium (also perfectly usuable as a fuel) to present a political concern about it "falling into the wrong hands". Thus our solution of just burying it rather then solving the actual problem of who has access to this material.
I mean if we drove our cars the same way; say a car can go 250 miles before the gas tank is empty. That means we could drive 7.5 miles, empty the rest of the tank, bury it in the ground, and then refill our car. Can anyone see the sense in that?
The US has an interesting history of this. We have a House of Representitives based on population, for which slaves used to count as a partial person. But when it came to extending rights to these people they were no longer considered to be "people". Politicans wanted to have it both ways and for a long time did. This same duality idea has been and currently is rampant and problematic in our society.
Re:Removing motivation to create innovative IP
on
Is IP Property?
·
· Score: 1
However, if you remove the financial benefits of its creation, there will (IMHO) be a drastic drop in the creation of what we now consider to be IP.
You may be right, but I don't think it'll matter. The reason for this is that although "less IP" will be created what is created will be of higher quality. Take any of the pop music today. How much of it will still be around in 20 years? 50 years? 80 years? As it stands now copyright lasts in the US for 80 years. Will Brittany still need IP protection then?
Another problem is the public domain. How much material in the public domain is used as a basis for education and cultural identification. If IP ownership is extended indefinately what will happen? I think it would be remarkably bad if schools had to pay royalties to companies just to teach literature and other subjects.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because they'd integrate it with a product that you already have, change the terms of service and force a mandatory update. Whereas with the Google product it's a software addon to your computer experince and you have to go download it yourself. It doesn't come preinstalled on 90% of computers.
An even cheaper (partial) solution is a piece of clear tape over the writing area. Its width and the writing area's height are nearly identical.
An interesting idea, but wouldn't it be better to just have a home battery backup system, like your computer does? Not something that'll let you live off grid, just something that'll keep your home going for 30-60 minutes, on average. Then you don't have to overcool your fridge before the grid has issues and let it warm up when there are issues. Same goes for heating (electric dryers, stoves, etc) and lights.
One of these proposed sensors, several car batteries (or similar) and an inverter. Charge the batteries from the grid when things are fine (4am?) and temporarily run off battery power when the grid has issues (peak of the day?). Much cheaper then refitting all your appliances or a whole solar setup for the home. However, if you wanted to add solar panels later it'd be trival.
Just a thought.
Electrolyzing water is short sighted because it's ineffeicent? The city of Los Angeles owns several coal power plants outside of California. One of those is a 1.6GW plant in central Utah. They ran wires 480-some miles to LA at about a 40% loss in electricial energy. This provides roughly 25% of LA's power, if I remember correctly. This is seems more "short sighted".
As far as solar plants being for "tree huggers" I suggest you look into "solar concentrators" (as opposed to photovoltaics: solar panels). These use mirrors to concentrate the light onto one spot that is typically filled with an oil or salt mixture. This in turn is stored in large tanks and as needed used to heat water to steam. From there the rest of the plant works like a coal or nuclear power plant. Beyond having no pollution (not even thermal, as the heat was collected, not created), there is no input fuel with a volitale price (example: oil in the past 2 years). The only disadvantage is like all power plants it's costly to start up. However, place one or several in Neveda or Arizona, near the gulf of California and you have a Very sunny region near lots of water. The price of electrolysis could drop to zero if the system (physical and economic) were well designed. Meaning that excess heat gathered and not sold as electricity could be converted to hydrogen fuel.
Summary: Conversion would be very pricey. However the payoff is a long term stable solution: stable for poltics, the enviroment and economy. Fewer-->No forgein conflicts over fuel, much less pollution (cars and power plants), and more homegrown jobs (to offset jobs lost due to fewer oil refinaries).
consider that most of the california electricity is generated by burning natural gas
Not quite true. Intermountain Power Agency (picture)is one of three 1600MW coal generators for California that is out of state. This one is in central Utah, the other two are in Laughlin, Nevada (Mohave Generation Station) and someplace in Arizona. (I've heard SoCal Edison sold its interest in the NV and AZ ones though, haven't confirmed yet.) Unfortunately IPA power plant is close enough to Arches, Bryce and Zion's national park to be causing significant pollution. After growing up in Los Angeles and now living in Salt Lake I've begun to realize how much LA residents take for granted. It's not in their backyard anymore so it's no big deal.
The simple solution is to build a large solar setup (not photovolatics, solar concentrators like the Power Tower near Barstow, CA) out past Palmdale. Given the desert conditions, the proximity to the energy destination (SoCal) and the promimenty to Lockheed and Boeing Skunk and Phantom -works (who would be constructing many of the pieces) how does anyone lose?
As far as the car fuel issue goes, I recomend hydrogen. Initially, it sounded like a bad idea to me but I've looked more into it and specifically how it's created. Stan Ovshinsky (inventor of the NiMH battery) has been continuing his work on storing hydrogen in solid metals (no compressed gas tanks) as well as developing good solar cells. Cells that are as flexible as a vinyl mat and very durable. He's demoed using a mat of this stuff with 12 holes punched in it powering a radio. The cells were actually pretty damaged and worked great. They're looking in to making roof shingles out of it. This would be good as the mat already looked pretty much like roof shingles. You could use the sunlight on your roof to create hydrogen from water (at home) and fill up your car.
It would take a lot to switch over but it took a lot to get the gas station / oil distribution system we have now. Much of the so called "hyrdogen economy" could reuse the existing system. There is no techincal reason why a gas station couldn't create hyrdogen on location rather then having it driven in daily.
In addition, many coal plants are cleaning up. Much of the smoke is now caught and "scrubbed". Most of the particulates are used to create cement now rather then smog. Several companies are using the smoke and its heat to grow algae on site which is then turned into other fuel. Once most coal plants are doing both of the above the pollution from them will be very minimal. I'd still prefer to see as much renewable energy as possible, mostly solar (with the new techs developed in the past 5 years, not the clunky things from the 1970s) but this is a good move in the right direction.
Paid? I was under the impression that Rob isn't all that in charge of Slashdot any more (since its sale). I also thought he has been employed working on stuff other then Slashdot in recent years. Just look at how often he posts versus Timothy, Michael or Zonk. Aren't (weren't) most of the editors just friends of his like Hemos, sengan and justin++. He started this as a hobby and something fun, it grew into a great community but now it's turned into some other beast. Small wonder he gets pissed when he gets tons of hatemail everytime something small goes wrong. Hopefully he won't pull a Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) and disappear after he's done here. I would like to see the next great thing he creates and I doubt hate mail will help.
Let's start a fund for this person to pay for:
1. A round trip ticket to Sacramento
2. Hotel stay
3. Several meals with state Senators and Reps.
We need more constructive ideas like this. Also, check out http://www.fueleconomy.gov.
But working for Bill Gates' company is not a natural human right, so what is objectionable about this? Just because he is wealthy (and he's a self-made man, remember), those 800 people suddenly have control over his finances?
Two things, first, William H. Gates III is completely self made? Ok. Sounds odd, but I'll let other's google this one.
Second: You are right, no one has a right to a particular job. However, rarely has threatening to take something away if criteria X is not met been considering a good bargining / trading tactic. Instead, the reverse, offering to do something for someone if criteria X is met has always been used.
For example: If you give me that house I'll give $100,000. That sounds like a normal deal. Whereas, saying "If you support this thing I don't want (i.e. software patents), I'll lay off 800 of your citizens" doesn't sounds like or represent normal business / trade activities. It sounds more along the lines of "Pay may $100 'insurance' to make sure your knees don't get broken." Although not as overtly illegal, it's the same tactic, and no one likes it being done to them.
I don't think so. We now have image recognition software and speech input for the computer. Neither are very advanced but both work. With some clever code a program could be written to identify videos and even place them in context. Add in logic and a database to keep track of what's been "learned" and you'd have the beginings of videos.google.com. This is the kind of interesting project I envision Google PhD's working on, on that weekly free day of theirs. If any one does end up doing this I expect it'll be a few years before we see any good products. Common computers have only just gotten to the point where video editing/playing/etc can be done quick enough (from a human perspective) to be worthwhile. Note that none of what I'm suggesting would require development of revolutionairy new software, just integrating a few things that are already there, followed by the standard incremental improvement process all software goes through.
We may not know much about drinking but we know LOTS about shitty driving. If you drive here watch out for the idiots that decide to make a right turn AFTER they've moved into the left turn lane.
I thought webrings died in like '97....
Not sure about soon. I think their next major conference is in August. My predictions are that they'll announce a fully 64 bit OS that dynamically runs 32bit programs as 64bit, a G5 mini and G5 Powerbooks. Oh yeah, and 3.0GHz G5's or the performance equivlents. Nothing with the iPod though, other then to mention its succuess. This is just speculation on my part based off of what I've read here and seen Apple do in the past. Should be a good year. My other prediciton is that in 2006 they'll have 10+% marketshare and Cell based Macs. =) Just some ideas.
If the tax rate is below a certain point, cutting taxes decreases revenue.
If the tax rate is above a certain point, cutting taxes increases revenue.
Sounds like a reasonable example of first and second order derivatives. Now I know a real world use for the Calculus that I took with my Computer Science degree.
hmmmmmmm, Sounds like Apple is listening to the users that complain. I would hope that over 8 years they adjust their product line.
I do agree though that the nature of the average slashdot commenter has changed a lot since 97. What do I have to do to be made an editor?
Article states Apple has 80% of the market. Other numbers I've heard recently have put it in the 60%-70% range. How is this a monopoly? They don't have complete control. Also they are not the only source of music or portable hard drives. They are the most popular but I don't know of any exclusive agreements they have that prevent other people from selling music online or prevent other people from making hard drive music players.
I use my iPod daily but have yet to use the iTMS. Also, if I wanted a different player I know of two popular ones (Creative Nomad series and the iRiver players) and many less popular ones. Apple has risen to the top here because they make a product that people like, not because they are excerting their domaince to maintain their position. In their main market of computers Apple has somewhere between 1% and 4% of the market. What monopoly do they have to leverage iPod?
tag in there somewhere...
GoboLinux is a Linux distribution that breaks with the historical Unix directory hierarchy. Basically, this means that there are no directories such as
To allow the system to find these files, they are logically grouped in directories such as
To maintain backwards compatibility with traditional Unix/Linux apps, there are symbolic links that mimic the Unix tree, such as "/usr/bin ->
www.gobolinux.org
Then I could use the filtering advantages of Thunderbird to target the people who target me. Perhaps one could even make it a menu option to open all the links in all the messages in your inbox, marked as spam, 10 times in a background Firefox.
It's not distributed, it's me taking them up on their offer. And since it'll happen when I check my email it shouldn't have the characteristics of a DOS/DDOS. When I'm done I just close a a window. I mean, I'm not really using my bandwidth when I'm sitting there reading my email, and wasting their bandwidth while filtering my email will give me a lot more satisfaction then merely deleting the email.
We could also develop better policies concerning nuclear fuel. When I last looked into it (please correct me if anything has changed) I found that nuclear fuel rods were considered "waste" when they reached about 3% of use. Rather then refining the remaining material and reusing the useful material we dub it "waste" and bury it. The rational I found for this was that once it reaches about 3% or so there is enough plutonium (also perfectly usuable as a fuel) to present a political concern about it "falling into the wrong hands". Thus our solution of just burying it rather then solving the actual problem of who has access to this material.
I mean if we drove our cars the same way; say a car can go 250 miles before the gas tank is empty. That means we could drive 7.5 miles, empty the rest of the tank, bury it in the ground, and then refill our car. Can anyone see the sense in that?
So you want a girlfriend with an Atari 800?
During class, at work, etc.
Sanity on silicon? I thought sanity was carbon based.
The US has an interesting history of this. We have a House of Representitives based on population, for which slaves used to count as a partial person. But when it came to extending rights to these people they were no longer considered to be "people". Politicans wanted to have it both ways and for a long time did. This same duality idea has been and currently is rampant and problematic in our society.
However, if you remove the financial benefits of its creation, there will (IMHO) be a drastic drop in the creation of what we now consider to be IP.
You may be right, but I don't think it'll matter. The reason for this is that although "less IP" will be created what is created will be of higher quality. Take any of the pop music today. How much of it will still be around in 20 years? 50 years? 80 years? As it stands now copyright lasts in the US for 80 years. Will Brittany still need IP protection then?
Another problem is the public domain. How much material in the public domain is used as a basis for education and cultural identification. If IP ownership is extended indefinately what will happen? I think it would be remarkably bad if schools had to pay royalties to companies just to teach literature and other subjects.