From the summary of the report 4 options were generated as a way of moving forward.
However looking at all the options it essentially boils down to three things:
1. The U.S. cedes real control to the international community
2. The U.S. cedes token control to the international community (option #2 proposes creating an international forum to "discuss" internet issues - read: eventually inconsequential)
3. Start from scratch
While it's tempting to hate on the Americans for refusing to give up control of the Internet's foundations, any kind of sharing would lead to power sharing with nations including China and Russia.
Slashdot has posted numerous articles about the Chinese iron fist when it comes to dealing with anything on the internet. I find it frightening to even think about the prospect of having my internet access dictated in some part by the blatantly power hungry government of this nation. Yes, the Americans are no white knights either, but I'd rather have their faulty system of checks and balances than the outright corruption and byzantine system of governance that still controls much of the world today.
Think about the recent stories of "adopting a Chinese blog" to protect the bloggers from chinese government reprisals. What do you think the Chinese would demand first if they were given real control of our internet access? Control of any content that originates from China - which means these bloggers who almost got away, would be tracked down again.:(
Eventually the answer is going to come from somewhere in between. There isn't going to be a peaceful transition of the entire system from the americans to the international community. But rather different parts of the world will begin to develop their own networks with differing levels of compatibility, and software and hardware vendors are going to make a killing in providing systems that can handle these multiple formats and networks.
This diversity will arise not only from politics, but from new technology too and I can totally see the European Union developing a "new internet" that provides alternative control to what the americans have -- and then subsidizing the cost of this network so that it is taken up by major subsets such as India and the Pacific, until it eventually supercedes the now "legacy" american systems...
I'm a Waterloo student and it's awesome to see how we did. Waterloo competes regularly and has had a winning place several times before.
As for the people who have been insinuating that the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rigged the results, take a look at the past winners page. They were the winners in 2002 as well (hosted in Honolulu).
As for the actual problem set: it can be found (PDF)here.
How then can Sony, without showing any kind of proof of concept or research, claim to have intellectual property rights in this area? Even if they have been granted this patent, I doubt that this will stand up in courts if they ever try to defend it.
2. If Sony gets the patent rights just for conceptualizing this, shouldn't the Wachowski brothers be granted these patents instead? They after all do have a low-fidelity model (the movies).
I find it sad that a big company like Sony can get away with these frivolous patents when genuine research work takes forever to get a patent on, and has to jump through lots of hoops too. I've had a patent application being worked through for over a year now and the hassle is just inane. And we have the the research, working prototypes and demos, not just fruity "prophetic" concepts.
I get tons of scammer emails from all the usual sources.. Ebay, Nigeria etc. And like most readers I recognize them instantly and delete without thinking about it.
Recently I was horrified to see that my dad had received an email from his "bank" asking to verify his financial details - it was an obvious scam from my POV, but my dad of course tried to reply (thankfully the email link had been banned by then so no damage was done). For the record he's got 3 degrees in physics, so I could hardly chalk it up to him being dumb. There is still a very high level of trust amongst users for the internet.
However, I'm pretty certain I could still scam people into giving me their credit card info by just phoning them and bsing something. So you can't blame the technology entirely.
Most users simply do not see the internet and all these threats the way we do. An big issue since we're the ones supposed to be helping them.
All the big companies, from the PC, the gaming console, the PDA and the cellphone sectors are focusing on the convergence of devices. Which is why the nintendo DS has a stylus, the Dell PDAs can play music etc. etc.
Eventually these people are picturing a superdevice that you would use for everything from entertainment to buying gas at the filling station.
In comparison to the complexity of such a device, something like Symbian OS is pretty primitive. So if they have such flawed design methodologies right now (more than one virus released, complaints from developers on/.) it does not bode well for us in the future.
I don't want to have to deal with superdevices that contain my critical information and run on software with the reliability of MS Windows. Companies like Symbian need to look at the basic design of their systems, and make them inherently better from the start to prevent mobile devices from suffering the same fate as PCs.
It takes too much power to drive actuators to raise the feet off the ground. A lot more energy efficient to use the wheels. Of course, it's a lot more complicated to build a walking mech too, and what they've built thus far is remarkable already.
Still, they take a hit in terms of agility - this mecha ain't going nowhere fast.
Now it needs a jetpack...
Slashdot Mirror
From the summary of the report 4 options were generated as a way of moving forward.
:(
However looking at all the options it essentially boils down to three things:
1. The U.S. cedes real control to the international community
2. The U.S. cedes token control to the international community (option #2 proposes creating an international forum to "discuss" internet issues - read: eventually inconsequential)
3. Start from scratch
While it's tempting to hate on the Americans for refusing to give up control of the Internet's foundations, any kind of sharing would lead to power sharing with nations including China and Russia.
Slashdot has posted numerous articles about the Chinese iron fist when it comes to dealing with anything on the internet. I find it frightening to even think about the prospect of having my internet access dictated in some part by the blatantly power hungry government of this nation. Yes, the Americans are no white knights either, but I'd rather have their faulty system of checks and balances than the outright corruption and byzantine system of governance that still controls much of the world today.
Think about the recent stories of "adopting a Chinese blog" to protect the bloggers from chinese government reprisals. What do you think the Chinese would demand first if they were given real control of our internet access? Control of any content that originates from China - which means these bloggers who almost got away, would be tracked down again.
Eventually the answer is going to come from somewhere in between. There isn't going to be a peaceful transition of the entire system from the americans to the international community. But rather different parts of the world will begin to develop their own networks with differing levels of compatibility, and software and hardware vendors are going to make a killing in providing systems that can handle these multiple formats and networks.
This diversity will arise not only from politics, but from new technology too and I can totally see the European Union developing a "new internet" that provides alternative control to what the americans have -- and then subsidizing the cost of this network so that it is taken up by major subsets such as India and the Pacific, until it eventually supercedes the now "legacy" american systems...
I'm a Waterloo student and it's awesome to see how we did. Waterloo competes regularly and has had a winning place several times before.
As for the people who have been insinuating that the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rigged the results, take a look at the past winners page. They were the winners in 2002 as well (hosted in Honolulu).
As for the actual problem set: it can be found (PDF)here.
There are several reasons why these patents should not have been granted. Here's two:
1. Prior art - slashdot itself has reported several times about the efforts of researchers who have allowed monkeys to control machines. with thoughts In fact some of this research has now been extended to human beings as well.
How then can Sony, without showing any kind of proof of concept or research, claim to have intellectual property rights in this area? Even if they have been granted this patent, I doubt that this will stand up in courts if they ever try to defend it.
2. If Sony gets the patent rights just for conceptualizing this, shouldn't the Wachowski brothers be granted these patents instead? They after all do have a low-fidelity model (the movies).
I find it sad that a big company like Sony can get away with these frivolous patents when genuine research work takes forever to get a patent on, and has to jump through lots of hoops too. I've had a patent application being worked through for over a year now and the hassle is just inane. And we have the the research, working prototypes and demos, not just fruity "prophetic" concepts.
I get tons of scammer emails from all the usual sources .. Ebay, Nigeria etc. And like most readers I recognize them instantly and delete without thinking about it.
Recently I was horrified to see that my dad had received an email from his "bank" asking to verify his financial details - it was an obvious scam from my POV, but my dad of course tried to reply (thankfully the email link had been banned by then so no damage was done). For the record he's got 3 degrees in physics, so I could hardly chalk it up to him being dumb. There is still a very high level of trust amongst users for the internet.
However, I'm pretty certain I could still scam people into giving me their credit card info by just phoning them and bsing something. So you can't blame the technology entirely.
Most users simply do not see the internet and all these threats the way we do. An big issue since we're the ones supposed to be helping them.
All the big companies, from the PC, the gaming console, the PDA and the cellphone sectors are focusing on the convergence of devices. Which is why the nintendo DS has a stylus, the Dell PDAs can play music etc. etc.
/.) it does not bode well for us in the future.
Eventually these people are picturing a superdevice that you would use for everything from entertainment to buying gas at the filling station.
In comparison to the complexity of such a device, something like Symbian OS is pretty primitive. So if they have such flawed design methodologies right now (more than one virus released, complaints from developers on
I don't want to have to deal with superdevices that contain my critical information and run on software with the reliability of MS Windows. Companies like Symbian need to look at the basic design of their systems, and make them inherently better from the start to prevent mobile devices from suffering the same fate as PCs.
It takes too much power to drive actuators to raise the feet off the ground. A lot more energy efficient to use the wheels. Of course, it's a lot more complicated to build a walking mech too, and what they've built thus far is remarkable already. Still, they take a hit in terms of agility - this mecha ain't going nowhere fast. Now it needs a jetpack...