Streaming is not that big an issue for Wikipedia. As you'll note from the page, the majority of which seems to have been widely accepted, generally Wikipedia video clips should be short and available in low-resolution versions, so they can just be downloaded in their entirety rather than streamed. The more important issue for Wikipedia was that the bitstream was frozen a little while ago, so anything encoded with the present encoder will be readable into the future.
Quite frankly, however, nobody has actually sought to place video on the Wikipedia yet. I hope it will happen soon, but right now there's been a fair bit of talk but no action from any contributors.
As to your suggested topics, see the last section on legalitiesin the discussion paper. There's a whole pile of extra paperwork you need to keep track of to legally post videos of the kind you wish to post...
I'd have to say that as well as being cute, she has been a convincing performer in a number of films playing different types of characters:
The Virgin Suicides: hard to judge, given her main job was to sit there and look stunningly beautiful in a just-post-Lolita kind of way.
Drop Dead Gorgeous: She played an ambitious small-town goody-two-shoes teen for comedy; was pretty effective in perhaps not the most challenging role.
Dick: playing a very dumb blonde teenager in a slightly more exaggerated manner; also very believable.
The Cat's Meow: playing comic actress (and mistress of Randolph Hearst) Marion Davies on a cruise where their relationship came under strain, slightly miscast (she was too young) but did a fair job in a role that required a fair range.
Spiderman: serviceable in a wallpaper role.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: meaty supporting role of a naive secretary; makes a major plot twist look convincing. Good work.
So, overall, in the things I've seen her in she's been a pretty good performer. I certainly can't recall a performance where she's been a shocker.
In any case, bad directing can make even the best actor look bad. Natalie Portman, besides being achingly beautiful, is a fine actor, and let's consider just how wooden a performance she gave in Attack of the Clones. It'll be interesting 20 years from now to interview her about working with Lucas; I think she might be less than complimentary.
I was joking - "Blame Canada, Blame Canada, with their beady little eyes...". I was listing everybody's favourite conspiracy theories as to why stuff like this doesn't get funded.
I think Bush is a dangerous moron and detest my government for going to war in Iraq on the basis of lies and distortions.
But he's a salesman-scientist trying to convince people to invest in his big idea. Are you going to tell them "We COULD build it in 15 years" or "well, it probably won't happen for 40 because {the military-industrial complex, NASA, them welfare queens takin' all our tax money, the Canadians} won't let it." If you want something to happen, it's a better idea to talk it up rather than down!
I love wingnuts who think the United Nations is coming to take away their 50-cal sniper rifles and force them to pray to Vishnu. It's kind of cute that they assign so much power to the organization, when in fact it's just a creature of national governments, most notably their own.
As far as the creation of the Outer Space Treaty, the United Nations didn't claim anything. A bunch of nations, including the United States and the USSR who were the only space powers at the time, negotiated the Outer Space Treaty, which they then signed up to. For the United States to approve any treaty, it needed to be signed by the President and ratified in the US Senate, which it was, unanimously.
Now, there's a case to be made that it's time for a serious look at amending or replacing the Outer Space Treaty in such a way as to encourage the private exploration of space. Far be it that the UN is somehow preventing the US from doing this, there are two ways the US could change the rules if it wanted to, and I quote:
Article XV Any State Party to the Treaty may propose amendments to this Treaty. Amendments shall enter into force for each State Party to the Treaty accepting the amendments upon their acceptance by a majority of the States Parties to the Treaty and thereafter for each remaining State Party to the Treaty on the date of acceptance by it.
Article XVI
Any State Party to the Treaty may give notice of its withdrawal from the Treaty one year after its entry into force by written notification to the Depositary Governments. Such withdrawal shall take effect one year from the date of receipt of this notification.
Seeing that the US government has neither proposed amendments to the treaty, or considered withdrawing, the only organization to blame for the US government's continuing to abide by the terms of the Outer Space Treaty is the US government.
You might enjoy the Ferrari domination, but for the rest of us the races are predictable as watching grass grow. Half the time you know the Ferraris will win by looking at the practice times. The other half of the time you know that the Ferraris will win by about lap 5. Then there's one hour and 45 minutes of the inevitable.
Then there's the circuits. I'm based in Melbourne, so we get the joy of a street circuit; you can't see *anything* unless you shell out hundreds of dollars for a grandstand pass (instead of $70 for general admission) and even then you can see maybe two corners.
I've seen F1, MotoGP, touring cars, supercross, speedway, even oddities like mud racing, both live and on TV. F1 has always been the most boring of the lot.
I've seen this story floating round, and colour me unimpressed.
Genetic algorithms are terribly clever, and are useful for many purposes, but to make them work you need a "fitness function" - the ability to check how good a solution is. And, seeing you're going to need to apply it to every member of the population in each generation, it better be pretty bloody low-overhead, and be a pretty close approximation of the real-world fitness of a solution. In fact, in my admittedly limited experience with them I found that 99.9% of the difficulty in applying genetic algorithms to a problem is finding an appropriate fitness function.
The fitness function these guys have used is to use a racing simulation game and run the race electronically. That's good if you're trying to set up a car to win that game, but if you're actually trying to win a real car race with a real car, if the only fitness function you have is sending your driver out for a few million trial laps it's just not going to cut it.
If, on the other hand, they had built software that allowed them to specify the car settings and tell them what lap time the car would achieve, that would be really impressive, and then you could bolt on the GA optmizer to find the killer setup. But using GA's like they have done is just a party trick - cute, but not that impressive.
There's a lot bigger gap in the performance of cars in F1 than there is in stock car racing. The rules of F1 are a lot less restrictive in what you can do to the cars, and so there's a lot more room for the teams with the bigger budgets to make the cars faster. In addition, F1 cars and circuits are just plain harder to drive, so the difference between drivers is shown up more brutally.
In race mode, there is of course another factor: where the aerodynamics of NASCAR give the advantage to a closely following car, the aerodynamics in F1 give the advantage to the car in front. Yes, this makes for awfully boring racing, but that's never bothered F1 fans who find it exciting to get a short glimpse of a red blur going past every couple of minutes...:)
I don't think there's a huge business in suborbital hops. Cheap payloads to orbit, maybe, but they're going to have to scale up their design a hell of a lot to be able to do that. John Carmack is a rich guy, but I don't think he's rich enough to pay for the development on his own, and finding investors in new space technology has been damned hard to do.
You're right that there's nothing that new about hydrogen peroxide fuel. What is new, apparently, is using a weaker solution (50% peroxide rather than 90%).
Though Armadillo have made some progress lately, Carmack stated in his last diary entry that Scaled Composites are odds-on favourites to win the X-Prize:
I think Space Ship One has good odds of success in the single-person-to-100km flight... At this point, I hope Burt has everything work out and he is able to make the X-Prize flights soon, because our prospects are pretty dim for getting everything working perfectly in the big vehicle in five months and having permission to fly it. I certainly don't want the insurance company to keep the prize money. If Space Ship One crashes, we will probably throw ourselves at an attempt, but it will be a long shot. No, I don't think any of the other teams are close.
I'm sure the Armadillo team would have loved to have won the X-Prize, but they don't seem to be too discouraged. They've built a rocket that flies and lands very neatly, and that uses a novel propellant mixture. I gather they're still going to try to build an X-Prize class vehicle over the next year or so. They've learned a lot about building rockets. And, judging by the celebration when they landed that test flight, they're still having fun. Sounds like a hell of a hobby to me, and I wish I had the cash to do something like it:)
While the MotoGP is exciting, the 125cc support category is more exciting still if you ask me. The machines are mostly very evenly matched, the limited power places a lot more emphasis on slipstreaming, the riders are mostly young and not particularly sane, and so the racing is really, really close and there's lots and lots of position changes.
Germans (my father's side of the family) collectively have a truckload of guilt over their country's wretched past. A racist and bigot convinced about a third of the electorate that the rest of Europe, and specifically the Jews, were responsible for their problems. Hence World War II and the Holocaust. Germans are therefore paranoid about anything like it happening again, and are prepared to trade off some aspects of free speech to try to prevent it.
I happen to think they're wrong, but when it comes to the danger of racist demagoguery, they have a very direct and painful perspective on the matter that you don't appreciate.
The Poms most certainly wanted us to leave our troops where they were, and Robert Menzies, that hero of the Australian conservatives, was happy to oblige. Menzies' government fell, and the new Labor government of John Curtin told the Poms where to go and brought the troops home to defend Australia.
The US has always been confident that it can stand on its own two feet. We aren't. There's a belief that if a really big nation came after us our best efforts at defence would be overwhelmed.
Again, this is rubbish (we have quite adequate defences against conventional threats), but some people still think it.
It's a tradeoff for other concessions. Australians get agricultural deliverables as a result of this.
Most of the economic analysis done seems to suggest that the benefits to Australia will be minimal.
In any case, the deal as it stands will lead to the long term death of the PBS (for the benefit of the non-Aussies, a scheme we have to provide cheap access to prescription drugs), and there's little chance of the enabling legislation getting through the Senate if that's going to be the consequence.
There's a belief amongst many Australians that Australia's military security and economic prosperity can only be protected by a "great and powerful friend". Before World War Two, that was the "mother country", Great Britain. In World War Two, the realization came that, in a crunch, Britain were unable to help us, so the USA filled that role. And the USA did. The USA and Australia fought together to stop the Japanese invading Australia and turning the place into a Japanese colony. Now, things were actually much more complex than that, but the "Yanks saved our arse" version is the one that's stuck in some parts of the Australian psyche, and has been with us ever since.
In addition, there's a profound debate that's been ongoing, pretty much since the Vietnam war, within the Labor Party about America and Australia's relationship with it. The details of the whys and wherefores of this are arcane and largely irrelevant; however, there remains a suspicion in the electorate that Labor is incapable of keeping "the Yanks" committed to Australia's security.
Now, I happen to think this view is bogus, and leads to counterproductive Australian subservience. But you have to understand the fear that we'll be abandoned that resides in some parts of the Australian electorate.
To talk about the "first computer" requires a definition of what makes a modern computer different from an abacus. One of the most relevant is Turing-completeness; the ability to simulate a Universal Turing machine. There's a well-known conjecture (it's not a theorem, you can't prove it, only disprove it) in theoretical computer science called the Church-Turing thesis that says anything you can compute, you can compute with a Turing machine. So if your computing architecture can simulate a UTM, you have a universal computing device.
Interesting and signifcant though they were, neither the Colossus, or Harvard Mark I had this ability. The Z3, as it turned out, did - though this was only proved in 1998, and was a "theoretical" proof - you could use the Z3 as a universal computer, but it wasn't really practical to use it in that way.
The ENIAC, however, ugly hack that it was, was designed and used as a Turing-complete computer.
The first computer with a stored-program architecture of the kind virtually all computers use today was the Manchester Baby, based on the EDVAC (?) design if I recall correctly.
I am well aware that there are dozens of blind alleys and very large sums of money (IIRC the figure is roughly a billion dollars - you undoubtedly can correct me) between an interesting piece of research and an FDA-approved drug. I'm just not convinced that handing a license to extort to Big Pharma is the best way to pay for that.
And even if patents are the best form of regulation for the drug business, what makes you think that patents, and copyrights longer than a lifetime, are the best idea for other industries? Have you considered that maybe software, where the costs in developing a patentable "invention" are often dwarfed by the fees to the lawyers who draft the patent, is a different kettle of fish? That the creative arts have, throughout most of recorded history, developed best by the liberal sampling of previous work?
Certainly, as I get dressed to go to my Big Evil Pharma job and plan a minor clinical trial that will cost cost millions of dollars, I'm glad for the patent system that allows us to do that.
So, going to hand your results over to the marketroids to publish your advert^W^W^W study? Going to publish at all if your results are negative? And, by the way, how much publicly-funded research was involved in the creation of that drug you're running the clinical trial of?
Jimbo Wales is the hugely benevolent dictator of Wikipedia.
Lawrence Lessig is a law professor at Stanford and the main guy behind the Creative Commons.
Eben Moglan is another law professor and the FSF's legal guy.
Christoph Hellwig is a major Linux kernel guy.
There's plenty of people on the list who I've got no idea about, but I get the impression that part of the idea behind this conference is getting coders, lawyers, creative arty types, and others together so they each get an idea of what the others are doing.
I'm not going to this conference, but in my experience conferences are as much about the chance to go and share ideas informally with people working in related areas as they are the formal speeches. As well as being a spur to creativity, getting to know somebody personally and discovering they're not just a sardonic e-mail writer tends to reduce the level of flaming on mailing lists. And has it occurred to you that conferences might be just plain fun for the participants?
There was a case where a painter (I think his surname was Boggs) developed a style of performance art where he'd draw pictures of banknotes to pay for things in shops, then telephone his art dealer to let him know a Boggs had been "spent". The art dealer would then contact the merchant and offer to buy the drawing, at a far higher price than the "denomination" on the "banknote". The drawings were clearly satirical and there is no way in the world you could mistake them for real banknotes, but in its infinite wisdom the Bank of England decided to prosecute him.
As often happens when interesting cases go before courts in the British Commonwealth, Geoffrey Robertson was the defence counsel, and told the story of the trial in his memoirs. By any literal reading of the law, Boggs was indeed guilty as sin. However, after some handwaving from the defence team designed mainly to show the jury that Boggs' art had gained some repute and fell into artistic traditions, the jury ignored the letter of the law, came down on the side of common sense and found him not guilty.
One of the questions from Ken Brown's lackeys was:
4) Could I get a copy of the original version of Unix that was released? My team is comparing Linux 1.0, Minix 1.0 and your first versions. If you can help with this, let me know.
As a cursory read of, say, this would have discovered, the original version of Unix was in PDP-7 assembler. While the overall design might be somewhat similar, there is no way in the world that "Linux 1.0" written in (mostly) ANSI C, and a little x86 assembler, would have detail similarities at the line-by-line level.
Not to mention the fact that Linux 1.0 was very far from Torvalds' earliest versions:)
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Quite frankly, however, nobody has actually sought to place video on the Wikipedia yet. I hope it will happen soon, but right now there's been a fair bit of talk but no action from any contributors.
As to your suggested topics, see the last section on legalitiesin the discussion paper. There's a whole pile of extra paperwork you need to keep track of to legally post videos of the kind you wish to post...
So, overall, in the things I've seen her in she's been a pretty good performer. I certainly can't recall a performance where she's been a shocker.
In any case, bad directing can make even the best actor look bad. Natalie Portman, besides being achingly beautiful, is a fine actor, and let's consider just how wooden a performance she gave in Attack of the Clones. It'll be interesting 20 years from now to interview her about working with Lucas; I think she might be less than complimentary.
- I was joking - "Blame Canada, Blame Canada, with their beady little eyes...". I was listing everybody's favourite conspiracy theories as to why stuff like this doesn't get funded.
- I think Bush is a dangerous moron and detest my government for going to war in Iraq on the basis of lies and distortions.
- I'm an Aussie.
Does that cover it?But he's a salesman-scientist trying to convince people to invest in his big idea. Are you going to tell them "We COULD build it in 15 years" or "well, it probably won't happen for 40 because {the military-industrial complex, NASA, them welfare queens takin' all our tax money, the Canadians} won't let it." If you want something to happen, it's a better idea to talk it up rather than down!
For those of tender years, this was an EGA/VGA side-scrolling platformer, and light-years ahead of any others for the PC at the time.
As far as the creation of the Outer Space Treaty, the United Nations didn't claim anything. A bunch of nations, including the United States and the USSR who were the only space powers at the time, negotiated the Outer Space Treaty, which they then signed up to. For the United States to approve any treaty, it needed to be signed by the President and ratified in the US Senate, which it was, unanimously.
Now, there's a case to be made that it's time for a serious look at amending or replacing the Outer Space Treaty in such a way as to encourage the private exploration of space. Far be it that the UN is somehow preventing the US from doing this, there are two ways the US could change the rules if it wanted to, and I quote:
Seeing that the US government has neither proposed amendments to the treaty, or considered withdrawing, the only organization to blame for the US government's continuing to abide by the terms of the Outer Space Treaty is the US government.
Then there's the circuits. I'm based in Melbourne, so we get the joy of a street circuit; you can't see *anything* unless you shell out hundreds of dollars for a grandstand pass (instead of $70 for general admission) and even then you can see maybe two corners.
I've seen F1, MotoGP, touring cars, supercross, speedway, even oddities like mud racing, both live and on TV. F1 has always been the most boring of the lot.
Genetic algorithms are terribly clever, and are useful for many purposes, but to make them work you need a "fitness function" - the ability to check how good a solution is. And, seeing you're going to need to apply it to every member of the population in each generation, it better be pretty bloody low-overhead, and be a pretty close approximation of the real-world fitness of a solution. In fact, in my admittedly limited experience with them I found that 99.9% of the difficulty in applying genetic algorithms to a problem is finding an appropriate fitness function.
The fitness function these guys have used is to use a racing simulation game and run the race electronically. That's good if you're trying to set up a car to win that game, but if you're actually trying to win a real car race with a real car, if the only fitness function you have is sending your driver out for a few million trial laps it's just not going to cut it.
If, on the other hand, they had built software that allowed them to specify the car settings and tell them what lap time the car would achieve, that would be really impressive, and then you could bolt on the GA optmizer to find the killer setup. But using GA's like they have done is just a party trick - cute, but not that impressive.
In race mode, there is of course another factor: where the aerodynamics of NASCAR give the advantage to a closely following car, the aerodynamics in F1 give the advantage to the car in front. Yes, this makes for awfully boring racing, but that's never bothered F1 fans who find it exciting to get a short glimpse of a red blur going past every couple of minutes... :)
I don't think there's a huge business in suborbital hops. Cheap payloads to orbit, maybe, but they're going to have to scale up their design a hell of a lot to be able to do that. John Carmack is a rich guy, but I don't think he's rich enough to pay for the development on his own, and finding investors in new space technology has been damned hard to do.
You're right that there's nothing that new about hydrogen peroxide fuel. What is new, apparently, is using a weaker solution (50% peroxide rather than 90%).
I'm sure the Armadillo team would have loved to have won the X-Prize, but they don't seem to be too discouraged. They've built a rocket that flies and lands very neatly, and that uses a novel propellant mixture. I gather they're still going to try to build an X-Prize class vehicle over the next year or so. They've learned a lot about building rockets. And, judging by the celebration when they landed that test flight, they're still having fun. Sounds like a hell of a hobby to me, and I wish I had the cash to do something like it :)
The World Rally Championship is also very cool.
I happen to think they're wrong, but when it comes to the danger of racist demagoguery, they have a very direct and painful perspective on the matter that you don't appreciate.
Nothing ever changes...
Again, this is rubbish (we have quite adequate defences against conventional threats), but some people still think it.
Most of the economic analysis done seems to suggest that the benefits to Australia will be minimal.
In any case, the deal as it stands will lead to the long term death of the PBS (for the benefit of the non-Aussies, a scheme we have to provide cheap access to prescription drugs), and there's little chance of the enabling legislation getting through the Senate if that's going to be the consequence.
In addition, there's a profound debate that's been ongoing, pretty much since the Vietnam war, within the Labor Party about America and Australia's relationship with it. The details of the whys and wherefores of this are arcane and largely irrelevant; however, there remains a suspicion in the electorate that Labor is incapable of keeping "the Yanks" committed to Australia's security.
Now, I happen to think this view is bogus, and leads to counterproductive Australian subservience. But you have to understand the fear that we'll be abandoned that resides in some parts of the Australian electorate.
Interesting and signifcant though they were, neither the Colossus, or Harvard Mark I had this ability. The Z3, as it turned out, did - though this was only proved in 1998, and was a "theoretical" proof - you could use the Z3 as a universal computer, but it wasn't really practical to use it in that way.
The ENIAC, however, ugly hack that it was, was designed and used as a Turing-complete computer.
The first computer with a stored-program architecture of the kind virtually all computers use today was the Manchester Baby, based on the EDVAC (?) design if I recall correctly.
And even if patents are the best form of regulation for the drug business, what makes you think that patents, and copyrights longer than a lifetime, are the best idea for other industries? Have you considered that maybe software, where the costs in developing a patentable "invention" are often dwarfed by the fees to the lawyers who draft the patent, is a different kettle of fish? That the creative arts have, throughout most of recorded history, developed best by the liberal sampling of previous work?
So, going to hand your results over to the marketroids to publish your advert^W^W^W study? Going to publish at all if your results are negative? And, by the way, how much publicly-funded research was involved in the creation of that drug you're running the clinical trial of?
There's plenty of people on the list who I've got no idea about, but I get the impression that part of the idea behind this conference is getting coders, lawyers, creative arty types, and others together so they each get an idea of what the others are doing.
I'm not going to this conference, but in my experience conferences are as much about the chance to go and share ideas informally with people working in related areas as they are the formal speeches. As well as being a spur to creativity, getting to know somebody personally and discovering they're not just a sardonic e-mail writer tends to reduce the level of flaming on mailing lists. And has it occurred to you that conferences might be just plain fun for the participants?
As often happens when interesting cases go before courts in the British Commonwealth, Geoffrey Robertson was the defence counsel, and told the story of the trial in his memoirs. By any literal reading of the law, Boggs was indeed guilty as sin. However, after some handwaving from the defence team designed mainly to show the jury that Boggs' art had gained some repute and fell into artistic traditions, the jury ignored the letter of the law, came down on the side of common sense and found him not guilty.
As a cursory read of, say, this would have discovered, the original version of Unix was in PDP-7 assembler. While the overall design might be somewhat similar, there is no way in the world that "Linux 1.0" written in (mostly) ANSI C, and a little x86 assembler, would have detail similarities at the line-by-line level.
Not to mention the fact that Linux 1.0 was very far from Torvalds' earliest versions :)