Fair enough. I don't want to get into a purely semantic argument here, but my objection was to using the term "freedom" to describe these abilities. The "ability to sue for losses" is artificial, and a system put in place as part of a larger, complex incentive system (specifically, a copyright system that is supposed to be an incentive for art creation/distribution). I guess I view "freedoms" as being more fundamental ("inalienable rights") rather than legal constructs that serve pragmatic goals.
I think suggesting that "freedom to sue" is somehow a fundamental right (on par with "freedom of thought," "freedom of speech," "freedom of assembly," "freedom of travel," "freedom of religion," etc.) is not the right way to look at it. (I now realize that this was probably not what you were getting at.)
One of the primary differences, in my mind, is that eliminating one of those "fundamental freedoms" (to speech, thought, etc.) would be a hugely immoral act on the part of the government and/or citizenry. However, the elimination of certain pragmatic laws (and loss of the associated "freedom to sue") is rather less significant.
I may have over-reacted to your wording and taken your quote out of its intended implied context. If so, I apologize.
As I said, there is a valid argument about what should be maximized (either the ease of tracking down law breakers or the privacy of citizens). You can even frame this as an argument about "rights" (the right of a copyright holder to control distribution vs. the right of a citizen to privacy).
However, my point, to emphasize again, was that a statement along the lines of "freedom to sue for losses" (that is a direct quote) is disingenuous. Everyone agrees that freedom is important, but if you ask people to list "important freedoms" I somehow doubt that "freedom to sue for losses" would show up on that list. Invoking "freedom" in this case is disingenuous: this is not a debate about freedoms.
There is a crucial debate here, and we do nothing to forward useful discussion by allowing silly statements like the one I was attacking.
Keep in mind that in this case you don't even have to use TOR for the actual torrent. You only need to use a proxy for the short time necessary to do a search on torrentspy and download the.torrent. After that, you can join the torrent in the usual way. After all, torrentspy only tracks torrents: it has no control over the swarm or what connections the swarm allows/blocks.
So, instead of a search taking 1 second it would take 3 seconds. The actual download would be just as fast. (That is, assuming you were willing to download a torrent without TOR before this block, then this block doesn't change your actual download speed.)
Also note that an easier solution is to switch to using a torrent tracker which does not block US users. For instance trackers not in the US (e.g. Pirate Bay) will probably not have any reason to block US users. In fact a tracker like Pirate Bay could mirror all of TorrentSpy's contents. Although this recent development is interesting, it will have little to no impact on the amount of downloading (or the ease of downloading) that goes on.
You bring up a very valid point, what we have here is reverse censorship. Because of the freedoms (freedom to sue for losses) offered in the US, these restrictions are imposed.
What? "Freedom to sue for losses" ? And does equal rights decrease freeom because landowners no longer have "the Freedom to own slaves" ? How do you reconcile "freedom of speech" against the "freedom to censor" ?
Get real. Just because you add the word "freedom" to the start of a sentence doesn't mean you are describing a real freedom. US users are not being blocked because the US is "too free." They are being blocked because US laws meant to protect copyright holders may require logging and disclosure of logs. This is in conflict with privacy policies.
There is a disagreement here about what "rights" are more important (ease of tracking legal violators vs. privacy). To characterize US laws in this instance as being about "freedom" is disingenuous.
I'm not sure that backlighting will work - since this is a reflective technology.
It is indeed a reflective technology... but the non-reflective state is transparent rather than black (in the scientific paper they actual show an image in the off/transparent state). The most obvious way to use such a technology is against a black backing. In the 'off' state the entire display looks black, but you can then adjust pixels to be any bright color you want. By mixing the state of adjacent pixels you can presumably get a white color, or anything else.
However the reflection effectively acts like an absorption if viewed transmissively. So if you had a backlight, you could tune the effective absorption band of each individual pixel. By cutting out a band of colors (and using adjacent pixels), you effectively have full color control.
So it's possible to imagine a future version of this tech where the display is normally reflective (black backing) but when required switches to emissive display (which would require a backlight turning on, and inverting the logic of the display pixels so that the colors don't come out inverted). Thus you'd have the "best of both worlds."
I know it was a joke... but I'd just like to point out that the technology is a reflective display. When they say that they can tune it into the UV, this means that the pixels can be tuned so that they are highly reflective in the UV (and don't reflect any visible light).
It's not emitting UV at you, it's just reflecting ambient UV. If you are outdoors, then some UV from the sun would be reflected off the display. If you take the display indoors, essentially no UV at all would be reflected since most light bulbs don't emit much in the UV. So, it won't be able to give you a sunburn unless you are already standing in full view of the sun!
On the other hand, it should be obvious that this ability means this display technology may find numerous other applications, since it can control the reflectivity not just in the visible but also in the UV and IR bands.
I appreciate your desire for real technology rather than vaporware. However this recent publication is interesting scientifically even if it doesn't pan out into useful technology.
Having said that, I would like to point out that this design idea is further along than many (most?) of the "display tech of the week" articles we read. In particular, in the actual scientific paper they show working prototype systems with multi-pixel displays. Their devices, while prototypes, have realistic parameters: 0.3 mm pixel size; 25 micron pixel resolution; 0-3 V switching requirement; stable over hundreds of switching cycles; etc.
Furthermore, they have started a company to begin building real technology: Opalux. Now, I acknowledge that many startups fail... however this technology seems relatively workable, and is further along than many other ideas I've seen.
These photonic crystals are being built into arrays of pixels, where each pixel can, effectively, control its reflection color. So, a pixel can set itself to 'black' by adjusting its reflection to be outside the visible range (in the IR or UV), or can set itself to 'red' by tuning itself to have a reflection in the red region of the spectrum. So each pixel can take on a continum of color values:
To generate a white reflection (or non-spectral colors, like brown), adjacent pixels would still have to do what we do in modern displays: one would be Red, the other Blue, the other Green, and your eye would see reflected white light. So in a certain sense it has the same pixel-clustering limitation of current displays.
However it's better than current displays in some ways. First of all, if your image happens to be monochromatic (or parts of the display are monochromatic) then you don't have to be using three display pixels for a single image pixel... so in essence you can triple your display resolution. No doubt if such displays become common, algorithms will be developed that allow the display to maximize resolution when possible.
Perhaps more importantly, however, is that the color range is greater. A typical display mixes Red, Green and Blue. But the wavelength of the Red, Green, and Blue that are available are inherently limited. This means that although the display can generate many colors, it doesn't actually cover the full color range of colors that your eye can see. With this proposed display, you can adjust the Red, Green, and Blue wavelengths themselves. This provides access to a wider color range. For instance, when this display sets itself to 'orange' it will be a pure spectral orange, rather than an approximation generated by mixing the right amount of red, green, and blue.
And, of course, an obvious advantage is that this system is reflection-mode. Like paper, it doesn't generate light, merely reflects ambient light. This makes it ideal for reading outdoors, in natural light, etc.
Just because something is "good enough to download" doesn't mean it's good enough to pay for. Or, rather, it means that the value (to the consumer) is above zero but below the asking price.
There are some cars on the market that I would never buy--they are, in my opinion, overpriced for what you get. However if someone gave one to me, for free, I would use it. In fact I may even go out of my way (take a bus ride across town) to pick it up. It's worth "a bus ride" but not worth "$20,000." Similarly a song may be worth "a search and click" but not worth "$0.99."
I can say with some confidence that the current pricing for songs is above what consumers are willing to pay, on average. Plenty of people have iPods filled with many Gb of music. At the asking price, this would cost thousands of dollars--well beyond what those people would be willing to pay for casual entertainment. For some of the albums, they may be willing to pay the asking price, but for the vast majority of music out there, it's perceived value is well below the asking price.
I'm not defending exaggerations like "all available music isn't very good." But I will say that, on average, what is produced is not considered of sufficiently high quality by the average person that they are willing to pay the asking price.
To say there's an economic gain when, in reality, you've spent the same amount of money is like saying that if I steal a car to get me to the movie's it's an economic gain - the only gain is for myself and nobody else.
But the sum of society does benefit. To continue with your car analogy: If everytime someone wanted a car, they created a free copy of someone else's car, then many individual people would be experiencing "economic gain" without an associated economic loss for any other particular person.
The car industry would be mad, of course, because people would buy fewer cars (but spending that saved money elsewhere, of course). Overall, for society as a whole, there would be an economic gain, however, because the amount of "stuff" that people have (cars, in this example) per dollar spent is higher than if people refrained from making copies of each other's cars.
Of course we can't copy cars but we can copy music. So when many people copy music, it represents an economic gain for those individual people, and hence for society as a whole. So, yes, unsanctioned copying of creative works is a way to create "more wealth." That doesn't mean that we "should" allow widespread copying, because, after all, purely generating more short-term wealth is not always the best strategy.
But, on a single transaction level, copying music does increase the wealth of society. (Where "wealth" is defined as "amount of stuff people have" divided by "number of dollars spent to acquire stuff.")
I'm not an expert in audio compression, so this is an honest question: How easy/difficult is it to perform "Dynamic Range Compression" in real-time. Is it really computationally expensive?
I see most of the comments here decrying compression, but a few reasonable arguments why it may sometimes be good/necessary (e.g. it's what consumers want, sounds better on low-quality sound systems, sounds better if you're forced to turn the volume very low, etc.). What I'm wondering is why we don't develop a digital audio standard that includes a "nicely mastered" track without compression. Thus the track has a wide dynamic range. Then, the meta-data for the file includes a few different "profiles" for dynamic range compression. The default profile could even be the "really loud" one appropriate for low-quality sound equipment. Most people would just hear the usual "loud version."
However, people who care about audio quality could set their equipment to automatically use the "higher dynamic range" profile. High-quality audio equipment could automatically select the most appropriate profile. In a more general sense, you could indeed have a "knob" (or software setting) that lets you adjust the compression to suit your tastes (even on a track-by-track basis).
I know to some extent this exists, because various music software have settings for "undoing" (as much as possible) the large audio compression that is routinely applied to modern music. Obviously it would be better to store the version with the higher dynamic range, however. So, unless it's too computationally expensive for something like an iPod to perform, it would seem that this would satisfy everyone's needs: Encode the songs with full dynamic range, and give people a knob (alongside treble and bass, etc.) to adjust the compression level to their needs.
(Again, not being an expert in such things, I welcome anyone who wants to point out by misunderstandings.)
I think YouTube should offer some sort of "revenue sharing" options, though.
YouTube already does this. It's called being a "YouTube partner." Most of the highly-subscribed channels are partners and get a bit of money from the views (Wikipedia info here and official blog here).
I'd prefer to see YouTube offer a "subscriber" option -- pay $x/month or $x/GB transferred to skip ads of all sorts.
I'm sure some users would take advantage of such an option. However my guess would be that most users (who frequent YouTube quite casually) wouldn't consider spending money on a YouTube subscription. So, ultimately, most of YouTube's revenue is not going to come from subscription programs. Similar to Slashdot: the subscriber option exists but it seems to be a minority who use it.
YouTube has a huge opportunity here to offer snippets, full shows, and amateur content, while offering the viewer the option to pay up front, or watch ads rather than paying. Bandwidth and hosting ain't free, not even for Google, who can also handle fee distribution between their hosting office and the content "owner." This is a big step to also reduce the need for companies to monitor for copyright infringement, as it gives them the option to host their own stuff and make the pennies per hit.
I agree that there is a huge opportunity here. Both amateurs and the big networks have the chance here to make serious money by posting content on YouTube. I don't think anyone has a big problem with ads, as long as they are reasonable (not too annoying, not too long, etc.). I'm hoping that YouTube understands how to implement ads (hint: reasonably unobtrusive, like Google ads, and not consistently bothersome, like TV ads).
my point is that since Linus shares his name with the product in question... When he speaks, people listen -- and I just thought that his using his position in the industry to spur development, reconcile GUI options, unify, etc... would be a good idea.
There's a lot of truth to that. People listen to him, and if he took a stand on various large-scale issues, it would have an effect. If he picked a particular distro, and said "everyone use this," then maybe people would migrate towards that. Then again, he is vocal on some issues (e.g. that KDE is much better than Gnome), and lots of people still ignore him. Moreover it just turns out that Linus is not really a great spokesperson. He is often brutally honest and cares little for ideological sensibilities.
In fact, it could be argued that the personality type that makes him so great at being the "benevolent dictator" for the kernel (strong opinions, detail oriented, more concerned with pragmatics than ideology) make him a terrible choice for spokesperson (makes enemies with strong comments, cares more about coding than marketing, doesn't care about large-scale ideology issues).
The fact is that Linus prefers being a technical guy building awesome technology, and doesn't really want the responsibility of guiding large-scale direction. Moreover, like many FOSS coders, he considers freedom of choice to be really important, and so has a general attitude of "do whatever works for you."
I figured I'd get flack for the initial comment I posted, but I stand by it.
Like I said, there's truth to your statements... however at the end of the day I think we're better off looking to people like Mark Shuttleworth as leaders of this movement.
I don't want to attack your post, but I wanted to touch on some of the points you raised:
I am thinking that his love for writing low level code is something of a failure of what will allow Linux to come into the mainstream.
It would be a mistake to think that Linux is the "head honcho" of the Linux operating system. He is voluntarily in charge of the Linux kernel, but he isn't really involved in other things, like designing the GUIs that run on top, or marketing the OS to the public. So, basically, Linus should be worrying about writing low level code. That's what he's good at. Other people are working on higher-level things like marketing.
I feel Linux can make some serious inroads on the desktop, but it has to be presented as a unified system. There's no unity... if you run Gentoo, RedHat, Ubuntu... it's not "just" Linux, because even within Linux you have fanboys for different distros.
I think we can all agree that the proliferation of distros, while beneficial in many ways, is confusing to the general public. However I think that Ubuntu has really done amazing things to address this concern. Basically, instead of suggesting to new users that they should check out "Linux," we should all suggest they check out "Ubuntu." This is not to say that Ubuntu is better than all the other distros (although, to be honest, I think it's quite slick and it is what I run). The point is that Ubuntu has emerged as a very viable distro for new users. It has polish, it has corporate backing, it has a fantastic user community, and it is now one of the most widely used distros.
For years, people have been saying that Linux needs to focus-in on one particular distro, to make it less confusing for new users. I would argue that day has come: you can confidently recommend Ubuntu. (And, once they overcome their initial trepidation about using a new OS, they will be able to migrate to any other flavor of Linux without much issue.)
getting the GUI perfected, fixing software distribution
I agree that Linux should keep improving. I am, however, always a little confused by the repeated calls for "uniform packaging in Linux" considering that the software installation methodology in Linux is, in my opinion, light-years ahead of Windows. With a single application (GUI or commandline) you can install any of thousands of tested, malware-free software. It's such an efficient system, that switching to the method of searching the net for a "setup.exe" of questionable origin seems like a huge step backwards.
Like many Linux users, when I first starting using it, I was annoyed at the differences and cried in frustration: "Why can't they just make it simple like what I'm used to?" With a little more experience, I discovered that there are very good reasons for doing things "the Linux way"... now that I'm used to it, I wouldn't want to go back.
Thus your quantum UNIX would have the 'ln' command but not 'cp' ( 'cp -l' is ok ).
That's a cool way of thinking about it. However I think in a real implementation of a quantum computer, the system would be a mostly classical device (including CPU, RAM, hard drive), with a quantum chip as a co-processor that is used for certain computations only. The existence of the chip, and the quantum implications thereof, would probably be hidden from the user/programmer. So for instance the compiler would take care of using the quantum chip for computations where it makes sense, but using the classical CPU otherwise.
For many things the quantum chip would be advantageous, but ultimately for many other things (especially data storage), a conventional classical computer is better (or at least cheaper). Of course, it's possible I'm not being sufficiently imaginative, and that there will be situations where keeping data indefinitely in quantum RAM will be advantageous... My main point is that adding quantum functionality to our computers doesn't mean giving up on the advantages of classical computing (e.g. simplicity, easy persistent storage). Hybrid computers provide the advantages of both realms.
a quantum gate or quantum computer is only capable of probabilistic answers
I don't think that's true. Yes, many quantum processes are fundamentally probabilistic, but that just means we need to avoid those processes when building quantum computers. The intended design for a quantum computer is to use unitary (invertible, deterministic, etc.) operations for the quantum gates.
The main roadblock to keeping the gates unitary (i.e. keep the error rate low) is to have the switching occur faster than the decoherence time (the timescale over which the delicate superposition decoheres into a random probabilistic mixture). This is certainly a difficult issue to solve, but in principle it is possible. The small-scale quantum computers that have been built to date were able to solve small problems deterministically.
As a practical point, it may turn out to be very difficult to build a quantum computer... but as far as I know the intended designs of quantum computers are not to yield probabilistic answers and then to average them, but to maintain coherence long enough that the final answer is deterministic, with an acceptably small error rate.
Your basic point, which is that we need to consider not just operating costs also manufacturing and disposal costs, is a valid one.
However the way you've worded it amounts to "since we can't account for all aspects of impact, I'm not going to worry about any aspect of impact." That's a bit extreme. Surely reducing our power consumption during the operating lifetime of our servers is a step towards greater environmental and fiscal responsibility.
Now, if you can show that the "energy saving" chips generate more pollution during production than the "normal" chips (and that this increase in pollution/energy-use/cost is greater than the savings during the lifetime operation of the chip), that's important. However I doubt that is the case. Thus, to ignore the potential advantages of power-saving measures in the data-center, simply because such measures don't address the orthogonal concerns of production impact, is silly.
I doubt that this would be specific enough (and of uncertain sensitivity) to be useful.
The paper goes into details of sensitivity and specificity. With regard to sensitivity they state:
The peroxalate nanoparticles were also capable of detecting hydrogen peroxide at concentrations as low as 250nM (Fig. 2b), and thus can detect hydrogen peroxide at physiologically relevant concentrations.
With regard to selectivity, they emphasize:
Another appealing feature of peroxalate nanoparticles for imaging hydrogen peroxide is their specificity for hydrogen peroxide over other reactive oxygen species.
Among the quantifications of this selectivity, they explain:
The specificity of peroxalate nanoparticles containing rubrene to hydrogen peroxide was therefore investigated. Figure 2d shows that peroxalate nanoparticles have considerable selectivity for hydrogen peroxide over other reactive oxygen species. For example, at 10 micromolar hydrogen peroxide, peroxalate nanoparticles gave a chemiluminescent intensity of 1.3×106 RLUs^-1, which is 50 times higher than with
either tert-butyl peroxide or the hydroxide radical.
I'm not an expert in medical imaging, but a 50-fold selectivity and nano-molar detection limit seem medical usable. No doubt other techniques for detecting inflammation already exist, but this technique may be a useful addition to the diagnostic toolbox.
The paper uses well-established chemistry to generate light-emission. They basically have an ester (peroxalate) polymer with a fluorescent dye (a pentacene derivative). A chemical reaction with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) changes the peroxalate groups into dioxetanedione groups. This irreversible chemical reaction leads to excitation of the fluorescent dye, and hence light emission.
The hydrogen peroxide is not really the energy source for the luminescence: it is more like a catalyst that enables the peroxalate groups to convert and thereby generate light. For use in a light-emitting device, you would need a large amount of peroxalate in addition to the hydrogen peroxide. Since the peroxalate is used up, you'd have to keep replenishing it.
Basically, there are easier (cheaper) ways to generate light!
However as a diagnostic tool this is great. The paper describes the use for medical imaging, but I see no reason why this couldn't be used for detecting peroxide in other situations, such as for forensics or detecting industrial leaks or contamination. (Then again, in non-medical contexts there are probably existing detection techniques that I'm not aware of.)
The overproduction of hydrogen peroxide is implicated in the development of numerous diseases 1-4 and there is currently great interest in developing contrast agents that can image hydrogen peroxide in vivo.
and:
The overproduction of hydrogen peroxide is implicated in the development of numerous inflammatory diseases, such as atherosclerosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and liver hepatitis 23-27.
The implicated references, if you care, are:
1. Lim, S. D. et al. Increased Nox1 and hydrogen peroxide in prostate cancer. Prostate 62,
200-207 (2005).
2. Chang, M. C. Y., Pralle, A., Isacoff, E. Y. & Chang, C. J. A selective, cell-permeable optical probe for
hydrogen peroxide in living cells. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 126, 15392-15393 (2004).
3. Miller, E.W., Albers, A. E., Pralle, A., Isacoff, E. Y. & Chang, C. J. Boronate-based fluorescent probes
for imaging cellular hydrogen peroxide. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 127, 16652-16659 (2005).
4. Albers, A. E., Okreglak, V. S. & Chang, C. J. A FRET-based approach to ratiometric fluorescence
detection of hydrogen peroxide. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 128, 9640-9641 (2006).
23. Polytarchou, C., Hatziapostolou, M. & Papadimitriou, E. Hydrogen peroxide stimulates proliferation
and migration of human prostate cancer cells through activation of activator protein-1 and
up-regulation of the heparin affin regulatory peptide gene. J. Biol. Chem. 280, 40428-40435 (2005).
24. Laurent, A. et al. Controlling tumor growth by modulating endogenous production of reactive
oxygen species. Cancer Res. 65, 948-956 (2005).
25. Stone, J. R. & Collins, T. The role of hydrogen peroxide in endothelial proliferative responses.
Endothelium-New York 9, 231-238 (2002).
26. Mohler, D. L. & Shell, T. A. The hydrogen peroxide induced enhancement of DNA cleavage in the
ambient light photolysis of CpFe(CO)(2)Ph: A potential strategy for targeting cancer cells. Bioorg.
Med. Chem. Lett. 15, 4585-4588 (2005).
27. Hirpara, J. L., Clement, M. V. & Pervaiz, S. Intracellular acidification triggered by
mitochondrial-derived hydrogen peroxide is an effector mechanism for drug-induced apoptosis in
tumor cells. J. Biol. Chem. 276, 514-521 (2001).
I'm not an expert in these matters, but looking over the paper, it seems that there is considerable interest in this diagnostic technique for a variety of conditions. (The fact that it was published in a high-profile journal like Nature Materials is already a good indication.)
The press release from Georgia Tech has a bit more information. The paper of this work will appear in the October issue of Nature Materials, but is already available online (for subscribers only, unfortunately): In vivo imaging of hydrogen peroxide with chemiluminescent nanoparticles Dongwon Lee, Sirajud Khaja, Juan C. Velasquez-Castano, Madhuri Dasari, Carrie Sun, John Petros, W. Robert Taylor & Niren Murthy. Published online: 19 August 2007; doi:10.1038/nmat1983
The paper describes the advantages of their nanoparticles:
The peroxalate nanoparticles have several attractive properties for in vivo imaging, such as tunable
wavelength emission (460-630 nm), nanomolar sensitivity for hydrogen peroxide and excellent specificity for hydrogen peroxide over other reactive oxygen species.
In the paper, they demonstrate the use of this photo-marker in live mice, and are able to image the location of hydrogen peroxide anywhere in the mouse body. An obvious question regarding the technique is the toxicity of the nanoparticles. They do not discuss this in the paper (it will probably be the subject of an upcoming study), but the particles are ester polymers, with embedded dye (a pentacene derivative). So they are not using heavy-metal nanoparticles: these are peroxalate polymers. I'm not an expert in biocompatibility, but from the chemical structure, I wouldn't expect it to be highly toxic (it probably even degrades in the body).
Obviously a detailed toxicity study would be required before use in humans. However it's possible that it could be rapidly adapted to ex-situ diagnostics (e.g. on tissue explants) and then be adapted to live in-situ imaging if/when it is determined to be safe.
Just that? Why, sure, I'll gladly make enough info public on myself and my friends to make identity theft nearly trivial.
Quite right. And it goes even deeper than that.
I know how to use the web in such a web that I'm "sufficiently anonymous." I know true anonymity is impossible (e.g. with an IP address and a subpoena), but I know how to restrict the information I give out to a level I am comfortable with, and totally out of my control.
One problem with ubiquitously-connected social networking is that I not only have to be careful what I reveal, but I am now very much dependent on what my "friends" decide to reveal about me. If they go mentioning personal information about me, and it's cross-connected through every social networking site I visit, then this represents a release of information beyond what I'm comfortable with.
Obviously this problem already exists (and currently results in, e.g., people wasting time un-tagging themselves from Facebook photos)... but a widely connected and widely available social graph exacerbates the problem. Suddenly I'm dependent upon the net savvy of every single person who is connected to me? (And, given the whole "six degrees" issue, that's a lot of not-so-savvy people.) No thanks.
The end result of more detailed, more available, social information is merely that those of us aware of the privacy implications will stop using social networking sites. Is that really the intent here?
TFA only briefly mentions the possible downsides of aggregating all of the social networking sites. It says:
It's recognized that users don't always want to auto-sync their social networks. People use different sites in different ways, and a "friend" on one site has a very different meaning of a "friend" on another.
My reaction is much harsher than this. I don't merely want the option of syncing/not-syncing... I would want (ideally) complete control over how widely distributed my "friend-connections" become. Frankly I hate having to maintain all kinds of separate username/password/accounts on different sites. But, I would hate even more if all those different accounts were automatically identified with each other.
The people I communicate with on Facebook are not the people I interact with on Linux forums or on Slashdot. The meaning of a "friend" (or whatever) on each site is totally different. Not only do I not want these connections treated identically... I don't want those separate accounts to be related to one another!
Frankly the downsides to having my online social activity interconnected are numerous: spamming, ease of monitoring me, etc. The end result is that I will either reveal personal information I didn't intend to, or conversely I will use the sites less freely because I'll be worried about revealing information (e.g. if I know potential employers will easily find the information).
Considering the numerous downsides, I have trouble seeing the benefit, to the end-user, of having a comprehensive, widely-accessible 'social graph.'
I find the "technical glitch" explanation quite a bit more plausible than the "Russian hacker" story. I use Skype a fair amount, and I find it rather flaky. Part of the problem is certainly on the user end (people with mediocre internet connections drop out frequently), but a large part is also the fault of Skype. For instance the Linux client lags significantly behind the Windows/Mac version, both in terms of features (e.g. video support) and bugfixes (e.g. random audio dropout). The network is also routinely flaky: sometimes users won't show up as online even though they are (hilariously, you can be in a conversation with a person who is marked offline!).
Now I don't mean to complain, since it is a very useful tool that has been a real help to me... and it is free-of-charge after all. However Skype network problems are, in my experience, not isolated but rather persistent.
(Note: If anyone has had good experiences with alternatives to Skype, that are multi-platform and support voice conferencing of 4-8 people, please let me know!)
It is flawed because the ISP just needs to look at your HTTP usage and see you connect to a tracker.
Hmm... Doing traffic shaping based on protocol type is one thing... but if your ISP is really, truly watching what IPs you surf to, then don't they lose their "common carrier" status? If they go to the trouble of interfering with downloads that originate from the pirate bay, then shouldn't they also be throttling your downloads from child porn sites, among others. If they are monitoring and imposing their preconceptions on your net activity, then they should be held liable for all the things they failed to filter. On the flip side, what gives them the right to interfere with legitimate downloads? (There are legitimate, legal downloads on the pirate bay, by the way.) Are they liable for interfering with legitimate uses?
I've never understood why ISPs willingly go down that road. It seems so legally dangerous to get into a filtering game.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough. I don't want to get into a purely semantic argument here, but my objection was to using the term "freedom" to describe these abilities. The "ability to sue for losses" is artificial, and a system put in place as part of a larger, complex incentive system (specifically, a copyright system that is supposed to be an incentive for art creation/distribution). I guess I view "freedoms" as being more fundamental ("inalienable rights") rather than legal constructs that serve pragmatic goals.
I think suggesting that "freedom to sue" is somehow a fundamental right (on par with "freedom of thought," "freedom of speech," "freedom of assembly," "freedom of travel," "freedom of religion," etc.) is not the right way to look at it. (I now realize that this was probably not what you were getting at.)
One of the primary differences, in my mind, is that eliminating one of those "fundamental freedoms" (to speech, thought, etc.) would be a hugely immoral act on the part of the government and/or citizenry. However, the elimination of certain pragmatic laws (and loss of the associated "freedom to sue") is rather less significant.
I may have over-reacted to your wording and taken your quote out of its intended implied context. If so, I apologize.
As I said, there is a valid argument about what should be maximized (either the ease of tracking down law breakers or the privacy of citizens). You can even frame this as an argument about "rights" (the right of a copyright holder to control distribution vs. the right of a citizen to privacy).
However, my point, to emphasize again, was that a statement along the lines of "freedom to sue for losses" (that is a direct quote) is disingenuous. Everyone agrees that freedom is important, but if you ask people to list "important freedoms" I somehow doubt that "freedom to sue for losses" would show up on that list. Invoking "freedom" in this case is disingenuous: this is not a debate about freedoms.
There is a crucial debate here, and we do nothing to forward useful discussion by allowing silly statements like the one I was attacking.
Keep in mind that in this case you don't even have to use TOR for the actual torrent. You only need to use a proxy for the short time necessary to do a search on torrentspy and download the .torrent. After that, you can join the torrent in the usual way. After all, torrentspy only tracks torrents: it has no control over the swarm or what connections the swarm allows/blocks.
So, instead of a search taking 1 second it would take 3 seconds. The actual download would be just as fast. (That is, assuming you were willing to download a torrent without TOR before this block, then this block doesn't change your actual download speed.)
Also note that an easier solution is to switch to using a torrent tracker which does not block US users. For instance trackers not in the US (e.g. Pirate Bay) will probably not have any reason to block US users. In fact a tracker like Pirate Bay could mirror all of TorrentSpy's contents. Although this recent development is interesting, it will have little to no impact on the amount of downloading (or the ease of downloading) that goes on.
Get real. Just because you add the word "freedom" to the start of a sentence doesn't mean you are describing a real freedom. US users are not being blocked because the US is "too free." They are being blocked because US laws meant to protect copyright holders may require logging and disclosure of logs. This is in conflict with privacy policies.
There is a disagreement here about what "rights" are more important (ease of tracking legal violators vs. privacy). To characterize US laws in this instance as being about "freedom" is disingenuous.
However the reflection effectively acts like an absorption if viewed transmissively. So if you had a backlight, you could tune the effective absorption band of each individual pixel. By cutting out a band of colors (and using adjacent pixels), you effectively have full color control.
So it's possible to imagine a future version of this tech where the display is normally reflective (black backing) but when required switches to emissive display (which would require a backlight turning on, and inverting the logic of the display pixels so that the colors don't come out inverted). Thus you'd have the "best of both worlds."
I know it was a joke... but I'd just like to point out that the technology is a reflective display. When they say that they can tune it into the UV, this means that the pixels can be tuned so that they are highly reflective in the UV (and don't reflect any visible light).
It's not emitting UV at you, it's just reflecting ambient UV. If you are outdoors, then some UV from the sun would be reflected off the display. If you take the display indoors, essentially no UV at all would be reflected since most light bulbs don't emit much in the UV. So, it won't be able to give you a sunburn unless you are already standing in full view of the sun!
On the other hand, it should be obvious that this ability means this display technology may find numerous other applications, since it can control the reflectivity not just in the visible but also in the UV and IR bands.
I appreciate your desire for real technology rather than vaporware. However this recent publication is interesting scientifically even if it doesn't pan out into useful technology.
Having said that, I would like to point out that this design idea is further along than many (most?) of the "display tech of the week" articles we read. In particular, in the actual scientific paper they show working prototype systems with multi-pixel displays. Their devices, while prototypes, have realistic parameters: 0.3 mm pixel size; 25 micron pixel resolution; 0-3 V switching requirement; stable over hundreds of switching cycles; etc.
Furthermore, they have started a company to begin building real technology: Opalux. Now, I acknowledge that many startups fail... however this technology seems relatively workable, and is further along than many other ideas I've seen.
These photonic crystals are being built into arrays of pixels, where each pixel can, effectively, control its reflection color. So, a pixel can set itself to 'black' by adjusting its reflection to be outside the visible range (in the IR or UV), or can set itself to 'red' by tuning itself to have a reflection in the red region of the spectrum. So each pixel can take on a continum of color values:
(Black), Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet, (Black)
To generate a white reflection (or non-spectral colors, like brown), adjacent pixels would still have to do what we do in modern displays: one would be Red, the other Blue, the other Green, and your eye would see reflected white light. So in a certain sense it has the same pixel-clustering limitation of current displays.
However it's better than current displays in some ways. First of all, if your image happens to be monochromatic (or parts of the display are monochromatic) then you don't have to be using three display pixels for a single image pixel... so in essence you can triple your display resolution. No doubt if such displays become common, algorithms will be developed that allow the display to maximize resolution when possible.
Perhaps more importantly, however, is that the color range is greater. A typical display mixes Red, Green and Blue. But the wavelength of the Red, Green, and Blue that are available are inherently limited. This means that although the display can generate many colors, it doesn't actually cover the full color range of colors that your eye can see. With this proposed display, you can adjust the Red, Green, and Blue wavelengths themselves. This provides access to a wider color range. For instance, when this display sets itself to 'orange' it will be a pure spectral orange, rather than an approximation generated by mixing the right amount of red, green, and blue.
And, of course, an obvious advantage is that this system is reflection-mode. Like paper, it doesn't generate light, merely reflects ambient light. This makes it ideal for reading outdoors, in natural light, etc.
Just because something is "good enough to download" doesn't mean it's good enough to pay for. Or, rather, it means that the value (to the consumer) is above zero but below the asking price.
There are some cars on the market that I would never buy--they are, in my opinion, overpriced for what you get. However if someone gave one to me, for free, I would use it. In fact I may even go out of my way (take a bus ride across town) to pick it up. It's worth "a bus ride" but not worth "$20,000." Similarly a song may be worth "a search and click" but not worth "$0.99."
I can say with some confidence that the current pricing for songs is above what consumers are willing to pay, on average. Plenty of people have iPods filled with many Gb of music. At the asking price, this would cost thousands of dollars--well beyond what those people would be willing to pay for casual entertainment. For some of the albums, they may be willing to pay the asking price, but for the vast majority of music out there, it's perceived value is well below the asking price.
I'm not defending exaggerations like "all available music isn't very good." But I will say that, on average, what is produced is not considered of sufficiently high quality by the average person that they are willing to pay the asking price.
The car industry would be mad, of course, because people would buy fewer cars (but spending that saved money elsewhere, of course). Overall, for society as a whole, there would be an economic gain, however, because the amount of "stuff" that people have (cars, in this example) per dollar spent is higher than if people refrained from making copies of each other's cars.
Of course we can't copy cars but we can copy music. So when many people copy music, it represents an economic gain for those individual people, and hence for society as a whole. So, yes, unsanctioned copying of creative works is a way to create "more wealth." That doesn't mean that we "should" allow widespread copying, because, after all, purely generating more short-term wealth is not always the best strategy.
But, on a single transaction level, copying music does increase the wealth of society. (Where "wealth" is defined as "amount of stuff people have" divided by "number of dollars spent to acquire stuff.")
I'm not an expert in audio compression, so this is an honest question: How easy/difficult is it to perform "Dynamic Range Compression" in real-time. Is it really computationally expensive?
I see most of the comments here decrying compression, but a few reasonable arguments why it may sometimes be good/necessary (e.g. it's what consumers want, sounds better on low-quality sound systems, sounds better if you're forced to turn the volume very low, etc.). What I'm wondering is why we don't develop a digital audio standard that includes a "nicely mastered" track without compression. Thus the track has a wide dynamic range. Then, the meta-data for the file includes a few different "profiles" for dynamic range compression. The default profile could even be the "really loud" one appropriate for low-quality sound equipment. Most people would just hear the usual "loud version."
However, people who care about audio quality could set their equipment to automatically use the "higher dynamic range" profile. High-quality audio equipment could automatically select the most appropriate profile. In a more general sense, you could indeed have a "knob" (or software setting) that lets you adjust the compression to suit your tastes (even on a track-by-track basis).
I know to some extent this exists, because various music software have settings for "undoing" (as much as possible) the large audio compression that is routinely applied to modern music. Obviously it would be better to store the version with the higher dynamic range, however. So, unless it's too computationally expensive for something like an iPod to perform, it would seem that this would satisfy everyone's needs: Encode the songs with full dynamic range, and give people a knob (alongside treble and bass, etc.) to adjust the compression level to their needs.
(Again, not being an expert in such things, I welcome anyone who wants to point out by misunderstandings.)
In fact, it could be argued that the personality type that makes him so great at being the "benevolent dictator" for the kernel (strong opinions, detail oriented, more concerned with pragmatics than ideology) make him a terrible choice for spokesperson (makes enemies with strong comments, cares more about coding than marketing, doesn't care about large-scale ideology issues).
The fact is that Linus prefers being a technical guy building awesome technology, and doesn't really want the responsibility of guiding large-scale direction. Moreover, like many FOSS coders, he considers freedom of choice to be really important, and so has a general attitude of "do whatever works for you." Like I said, there's truth to your statements... however at the end of the day I think we're better off looking to people like Mark Shuttleworth as leaders of this movement.
For years, people have been saying that Linux needs to focus-in on one particular distro, to make it less confusing for new users. I would argue that day has come: you can confidently recommend Ubuntu. (And, once they overcome their initial trepidation about using a new OS, they will be able to migrate to any other flavor of Linux without much issue.) I agree that Linux should keep improving. I am, however, always a little confused by the repeated calls for "uniform packaging in Linux" considering that the software installation methodology in Linux is, in my opinion, light-years ahead of Windows. With a single application (GUI or commandline) you can install any of thousands of tested, malware-free software. It's such an efficient system, that switching to the method of searching the net for a "setup.exe" of questionable origin seems like a huge step backwards.
Like many Linux users, when I first starting using it, I was annoyed at the differences and cried in frustration: "Why can't they just make it simple like what I'm used to?" With a little more experience, I discovered that there are very good reasons for doing things "the Linux way"... now that I'm used to it, I wouldn't want to go back.
For many things the quantum chip would be advantageous, but ultimately for many other things (especially data storage), a conventional classical computer is better (or at least cheaper). Of course, it's possible I'm not being sufficiently imaginative, and that there will be situations where keeping data indefinitely in quantum RAM will be advantageous... My main point is that adding quantum functionality to our computers doesn't mean giving up on the advantages of classical computing (e.g. simplicity, easy persistent storage). Hybrid computers provide the advantages of both realms.
The main roadblock to keeping the gates unitary (i.e. keep the error rate low) is to have the switching occur faster than the decoherence time (the timescale over which the delicate superposition decoheres into a random probabilistic mixture). This is certainly a difficult issue to solve, but in principle it is possible. The small-scale quantum computers that have been built to date were able to solve small problems deterministically.
As a practical point, it may turn out to be very difficult to build a quantum computer... but as far as I know the intended designs of quantum computers are not to yield probabilistic answers and then to average them, but to maintain coherence long enough that the final answer is deterministic, with an acceptably small error rate.
Your basic point, which is that we need to consider not just operating costs also manufacturing and disposal costs, is a valid one.
However the way you've worded it amounts to "since we can't account for all aspects of impact, I'm not going to worry about any aspect of impact." That's a bit extreme. Surely reducing our power consumption during the operating lifetime of our servers is a step towards greater environmental and fiscal responsibility.
Now, if you can show that the "energy saving" chips generate more pollution during production than the "normal" chips (and that this increase in pollution/energy-use/cost is greater than the savings during the lifetime operation of the chip), that's important. However I doubt that is the case. Thus, to ignore the potential advantages of power-saving measures in the data-center, simply because such measures don't address the orthogonal concerns of production impact, is silly.
The short answer is: no.
The paper uses well-established chemistry to generate light-emission. They basically have an ester (peroxalate) polymer with a fluorescent dye (a pentacene derivative). A chemical reaction with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) changes the peroxalate groups into dioxetanedione groups. This irreversible chemical reaction leads to excitation of the fluorescent dye, and hence light emission.
The hydrogen peroxide is not really the energy source for the luminescence: it is more like a catalyst that enables the peroxalate groups to convert and thereby generate light. For use in a light-emitting device, you would need a large amount of peroxalate in addition to the hydrogen peroxide. Since the peroxalate is used up, you'd have to keep replenishing it.
Basically, there are easier (cheaper) ways to generate light!
However as a diagnostic tool this is great. The paper describes the use for medical imaging, but I see no reason why this couldn't be used for detecting peroxide in other situations, such as for forensics or detecting industrial leaks or contamination. (Then again, in non-medical contexts there are probably existing detection techniques that I'm not aware of.)
In vivo imaging of hydrogen peroxide with chemiluminescent nanoparticles Dongwon Lee, Sirajud Khaja, Juan C. Velasquez-Castano, Madhuri Dasari, Carrie Sun, John Petros, W. Robert Taylor & Niren Murthy. Published online: 19 August 2007; doi:10.1038/nmat1983
The paper describes the advantages of their nanoparticles: In the paper, they demonstrate the use of this photo-marker in live mice, and are able to image the location of hydrogen peroxide anywhere in the mouse body. An obvious question regarding the technique is the toxicity of the nanoparticles. They do not discuss this in the paper (it will probably be the subject of an upcoming study), but the particles are ester polymers, with embedded dye (a pentacene derivative). So they are not using heavy-metal nanoparticles: these are peroxalate polymers. I'm not an expert in biocompatibility, but from the chemical structure, I wouldn't expect it to be highly toxic (it probably even degrades in the body).
Obviously a detailed toxicity study would be required before use in humans. However it's possible that it could be rapidly adapted to ex-situ diagnostics (e.g. on tissue explants) and then be adapted to live in-situ imaging if/when it is determined to be safe.
I know how to use the web in such a web that I'm "sufficiently anonymous." I know true anonymity is impossible (e.g. with an IP address and a subpoena), but I know how to restrict the information I give out to a level I am comfortable with, and totally out of my control.
One problem with ubiquitously-connected social networking is that I not only have to be careful what I reveal, but I am now very much dependent on what my "friends" decide to reveal about me. If they go mentioning personal information about me, and it's cross-connected through every social networking site I visit, then this represents a release of information beyond what I'm comfortable with.
Obviously this problem already exists (and currently results in, e.g., people wasting time un-tagging themselves from Facebook photos)... but a widely connected and widely available social graph exacerbates the problem. Suddenly I'm dependent upon the net savvy of every single person who is connected to me? (And, given the whole "six degrees" issue, that's a lot of not-so-savvy people.) No thanks.
The end result of more detailed, more available, social information is merely that those of us aware of the privacy implications will stop using social networking sites. Is that really the intent here?
The people I communicate with on Facebook are not the people I interact with on Linux forums or on Slashdot. The meaning of a "friend" (or whatever) on each site is totally different. Not only do I not want these connections treated identically... I don't want those separate accounts to be related to one another!
Frankly the downsides to having my online social activity interconnected are numerous: spamming, ease of monitoring me, etc. The end result is that I will either reveal personal information I didn't intend to, or conversely I will use the sites less freely because I'll be worried about revealing information (e.g. if I know potential employers will easily find the information).
Considering the numerous downsides, I have trouble seeing the benefit, to the end-user, of having a comprehensive, widely-accessible 'social graph.'
I find the "technical glitch" explanation quite a bit more plausible than the "Russian hacker" story. I use Skype a fair amount, and I find it rather flaky. Part of the problem is certainly on the user end (people with mediocre internet connections drop out frequently), but a large part is also the fault of Skype. For instance the Linux client lags significantly behind the Windows/Mac version, both in terms of features (e.g. video support) and bugfixes (e.g. random audio dropout). The network is also routinely flaky: sometimes users won't show up as online even though they are (hilariously, you can be in a conversation with a person who is marked offline!).
Now I don't mean to complain, since it is a very useful tool that has been a real help to me... and it is free-of-charge after all. However Skype network problems are, in my experience, not isolated but rather persistent.
(Note: If anyone has had good experiences with alternatives to Skype, that are multi-platform and support voice conferencing of 4-8 people, please let me know!)
I've never understood why ISPs willingly go down that road. It seems so legally dangerous to get into a filtering game.