People have shown how much they're willing to pay, why charge less?
Competition.
If your product costs (including warranty fulfillment) are lower than your competitor's, you can sell at a lower price while still maintaining profitability. This means that you can underprice your competitors, thus getting a larger market share == more sales == more profit.
Keep in mind that in the long term, for an ideal free market, sale price approaches marginal production cost.
FWIW, transmission of impulses in the brain is also electrical, except at nerve cell junctions. The myelin sheathing on the axons does slow down the impulses a ton though, so I think the simulation would still be much faster.
I drove him to the dealership to pick up his car, I was there when they told him this... not sure if anything's changed in the transmission / fuel supply system since then. The model was the SC2, his was a '94.
Some notes on his driving: typically shifted at about 7k RPMs, wasn't very good at driving a stick... lots of clutch errors (both popping and grinding).
At any rate, your long-distant analysis doesn't mean much to me... I was there:).
Lots of cars already do this... A friend of mine red-lined his Saturn Coupe several times, and when he got a regular servicing at the dealership they told him his warranty on the power train was no longer valid (though the rest of the warranty was valid, IIRC). This was back in fall of '94 or spring of '95, I'd imagine that this practice has become more extensively implemented and more widespread since then.
Personally, I'm all for it -- as you say, we all pay more for goods when people abuse warranties on them.
As for false-positives... going back to my friend's Saturn, the dealership told him that although any redlining supposedly voided the warranty, they gave their customers one (maybe two?) "free" redlines in any 12-month period. This would help with false-positives, but I don't think it would work for consumer electronics, since a single immersion would cause failure, unlike redlining a car. But I think the damage from false positives could be mitigated via good customer service policy (but now I'm fantasizing, I guess).
For obvious reasons a computer made of 'n' atoms cannot simulate a brain made of 'n' atoms as fast as that brain can work
First... there is no requirement that the computer cannot be some x*n atoms.
Second... I'm not sure that this would be the case:
It is possible that the only way to simulate a brain is to simulate every single atom involved within a brain.
It's quite possible that, say, only 1% of the atoms in the brain are required for the brain activity we'd like to simulate. Off the top of my head (ha!) some examples would be those atoms involved in nutrient uptake, metabolism, and waste removal. I'm sure there're also atoms like those that give length to axons... those don't need 1:1 representation, a timed loop could represent them. Or all the neurotransmitters, those atoms could be instead represented by a few bits used as a counter.
Basically, my argument boils down to this: I don't think the goal would be to build a simulacrum of the brain. Just a simulation of the brain. This gives lots of room for making things more efficient (though maintaining accuracy would, of course, be necessary).
to create an application that both supported GPU optimization and could run naively on any system?
Yes, that's the solution. Have your code run on any system, all too willing to be duped by street vendors, and blissfully unaware of the nefarious intentions of the guy waving candy from the back of the BUS.
Makes sense. He was lamenting how today's slashdot is so much worse than the slashdot of yesteryear.
While we're adding frequent dupes back into the mix, can we also please have Cowbow Neal added back into the poll options? And also please let's go back to constant blogspamming, and take 'ref=nofollow' out of the links.
And that's exactly how much of his post you needed to read to get his message:
1. He uses OO because it doesn't have the ribbon like Office does 2. He doesn't like Office (hence the pejorative).
Seems to me that he communicated quite effectively.
Of course, you can decide that he isn't worth reading because he pokes fun of a product. If that's the case, I feel sorry for you. Plenty of insight is draped in sarcasm or stupid name-calling.
I think the goal had nothing to do with selling manuals, or greater usability, or anything practical.
The goal was to make the new version of Office seem "different" so that people would justify spending lots of cash on it.
Small, incremental, behind-the-scenes upgrades to a product, while truly valuable, just don't get the same "I got something for my money" reaction that a UI change does.
Just to expound on that a bit... there is a logical reason for it.
Letting a bureaucratic patent examiner be the final arbiter of patent claims leaves the potential for errors with far-reaching (for the applicants) consequences, never mind the potential for abuse.
The Patent Office's current practice seems to be "If everything appears to be in order, grant the patent -- any disputes can be settled in court".
The reason this is a somewhat logical approach is because in court, both sides of the dispute have the ability to present their cases, which theoretically results in a fairer result.
The downside, of course, is the cost (both public cost, and the litigants' costs) of hearings and/or trials. As usual, when lawyers write the laws and regulations, lawyers benefit from them.
And while court costs and legal fees have a way of squeezing out the little guy, it's reassuring to me that patents can be argued in court, and applicants aren't *entirely* dependent on the whim of a patent examiner or two.
Or using any of the commercial products used to kill bugs without destroying their shape. Hell, a kid's amateur entymology set comes with one of those, when I was a kid it was a liquid in a dropper vial. The stuff worked well, assuming I had the critter in a net first. Then you wait for the liquid to dry, and presto! -- you've got a mountable (and imagable) specimen.
If you're response to an Ask Slashdot submission about $X is "Ask a lawyer about $X", then you should rewrite the Ask Slashdot question in your mind to "What should I know before I talk to a lawyer about $X?"
Lawyers are expensive. Community knowledge can e very helpful in reducing the amount needing to be spend on legal fees, and I'm sure plenty of Slashdotters have good insight that can help the submitter.
For my part, all I can say is that I wouldn't use a doctor if I knew they used Google Apps. There's too much risk that an employee at Google might let loose the secret of my debilitating suppurative penile encrustations.
Most gasoline cars are sized to have about 400 miles range
Every car I've owned has had a practical range of around 300 mi (Ford Ranger, Chevy S-10, Plymouth Voyager, Honda Civic, Toyota Camry). It doesn't invalidate your point, it just makes the 320 km seem a little better.
And FWIW, 320 km is more than a typical person drives in a day... I don't think this is intended as a long-road-trip vehicle, but instead as a daily-use vehicle.
I know it's anathema to some, but please RTFA. There's a qualifier in TFA that submitter left out (emphasis mine):
Coupled with current recycling methods, the technique could entirely prevent old LCD TVs, laptops and computer monitors from being incinerated or added to landfills.
For some snark: That's mostly because current recycling methods are largely composed of shipping the parts to third-world countries where they burn them (NOT in an incinerator) to extract heavy metals.
Seriously, though, if this process does truly result in a significant market for recycling process outputs, it could help make recycling old monitors economically sound. I suspect, however, that it will still be cheaper to make the PVA byproduct from scratch, and ship monitors to developing nations for scrapping.
Let Circle A be the traveling public. Let Circle B, intersecting circle A, be terrorists. Let Circle C, within Circle A, but intersecting Circle B, be the set of those who the test identifies as terrorists.
Any person in Circle C but not in Circle B is a false positive. Any person in Circle B but not in Circle C is a false negative.
Vary the location and size of Circle C to demonstrate tests of varying accuracy.
This works for terrorists, for cancer, for any test, really. Just wish I could draw it in my post instead of explaining it out.
That's ridiculous. Apple implemented the CMD IDE chip properly. The truth of the matter is that the chip, and the implementation instructions, were changed after the iPod went into production.
Multiple sources confirm that the source of the chip and instruction change was no other then Googol the Destroyer, in an effort to stop Joba and Gatus from preventing him from wreaking the End of Days upon the world via the Rite of a Thousand Targeted Ads.
When last we saw our heroes, Gatus and Joba strove to recruit all the world's developers to write the One True OS with Global Search in order to stop Googol; the druid Stallmanx had failed in his efforts to trick Googol into signing away his powers (via a contract written by his attendant Beard Gnomes). Googol was busy devouring data with gobsmacking satisfaction, and weaving his Dark Fibers into the Evil Woven Tapestry of Universe Description, while his evil underlords continue to build the database of all possible ways the world can be saved and developing counterstrategies for them.
Unfortunately for our heroes, it appears that their actions have not gone unnoticed by Googol the Destroyer. Apparantly Joba's subversion of the fashion-conscious developers has gotten under Googol the Destroyer's skin... for now he has provided chipmakers with incendiary devices to be implanted in iPods and Zunes, and threats of zero pagerank if they do not follow his directives.
Both Zunes that have been sold have since blown up, while approximately 15 iPods have blown up in the test phase of "Operation iPlosion". This apparently was less than Googol anticipated, due to the protection of the Reality Distortion Field of iPod users with sufficient devotion to He of the Black Turtleneck.
Meanwhile, in Stallmanx's laboratory, his Beard Gnomes have nearly finished the contracts and licenses that may yet save the world from the predations of Googol. Just what lies within those documents?
How will Gatus and Joba recruit the rest of the world's developers? What cunning plan will Googol the Destroyer think of next? Will he overcome the effects of the Reality Distortion Field? Will our heroes be thwarted?
Tune in to next week's episode of Googol the Destroyer to find out!
I welcome these "obvious" Ask Slashdot articles. They are what enables me to convince my employer that slashdot is a work resource that needs to be whitelisted.
Not really... but in case I hear those dreaded words ("What is slashdot.org") come review time... I'll have some defensive ammunition.
You've got an excel spreadsheet? You're a lucky bastard.
I have a customized Peoplesoft implementation for asset tracking, designed by three blind goatherds, one of whom also had leprosy (I may be exaggerating a bit. I suspect it was more like twenty, ~since having more people design a system is always a good idea~).
Seriously... Search for asset. Find asset. Enable correct history mode. Click through four forms to get to custodian details. Update custodian details. Run asset update process. Check process monitor for error messages. Resolve errors. Rerun update process. And that's a simple change.
Heaven/Hell forbid there was any issue with the Tag # or Serial # assigned to an asset.
Hell hath no torment like a Peoplesoft implementation used for something it has no business being used for.
While I'm on the subject (and waiting for the timer to allow me to post again:) -- here are the two books in my library relating to patents:
The English Patents of Monopoly: A History by William Hyde Price (heavy economics bent)
Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660-1800
There is plenty of material online about both the English patent system and the American patent system... but the foundations of the American system lie in England and in France.
As for age, you might be surprised.:) The reason I mentioned middle school is because that was when I was taught the same thing you claim... only later did I become aware of what a fallacy it was.
As for the goals of patents when they were established, I think you need to do some reading.
The original use of patents was purely to grant government-sponsored monopolies, irrespective of invention. Patents were granted in England on spices, on salt, and on other goods. These patents were sold, and were a source of revenue for the Crown. Eventually, due to many complaints, the granting of patents was limited to new inventions.
While the preservation of knowledge was a nice side effect, that's all it was. Here's a link you should read. Choice quote:
As Abraham Lincoln once put it "The Patent System added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius."
We're partly having a semantics argument, here, but I think there's a very important distinction between 'making the knowledge public' the primary goal, and 'ensuring profit for the inventor' the primary goal. The primary purpose of the system defines how the system is implemented, and the private profit vs. public benefit debate has favored either side during history. In order to understand the patent system, it's crucial to understand that private profit lies at the foundation of the patent system. The public benefit comes primarily not from publishing of the invention, but instead by the very act of invention itself. The profit interest fuels the fire of invention, to paraphrase that Lincoln quote.
Patents were created *precisely* so that inventions would be published and not lost.
Despite what you might have been told in middle school, that is not the case. Patents were created to promote technological advancement by securing a revenue stream for inventors who sell their devices to others. Not to preserve technical knowledge in the event of a catastrophe eliminating the persons with knowledge of a trade secret.
The whole point of a patent is that I can invent a device, and then sell dozens of the devices to other people for them to use. They are forbidden from reverse-engineering the device to make & sell their own, because I hold the patent on it.
It's about preserving the revenue stream for inventors, while ensuring the device actually gets used.
Preservation of knowledge is a nice secondary effect, but the primary effect is promotion of technological advancement.
Slashdot Mirror
Competition.
If your product costs (including warranty fulfillment) are lower than your competitor's, you can sell at a lower price while still maintaining profitability. This means that you can underprice your competitors, thus getting a larger market share == more sales == more profit.
Keep in mind that in the long term, for an ideal free market, sale price approaches marginal production cost.
FWIW, transmission of impulses in the brain is also electrical, except at nerve cell junctions. The myelin sheathing on the axons does slow down the impulses a ton though, so I think the simulation would still be much faster.
I drove him to the dealership to pick up his car, I was there when they told him this... not sure if anything's changed in the transmission / fuel supply system since then. The model was the SC2, his was a '94.
:).
Some notes on his driving: typically shifted at about 7k RPMs, wasn't very good at driving a stick... lots of clutch errors (both popping and grinding).
At any rate, your long-distant analysis doesn't mean much to me... I was there
Lots of cars already do this... A friend of mine red-lined his Saturn Coupe several times, and when he got a regular servicing at the dealership they told him his warranty on the power train was no longer valid (though the rest of the warranty was valid, IIRC). This was back in fall of '94 or spring of '95, I'd imagine that this practice has become more extensively implemented and more widespread since then.
Personally, I'm all for it -- as you say, we all pay more for goods when people abuse warranties on them.
As for false-positives... going back to my friend's Saturn, the dealership told him that although any redlining supposedly voided the warranty, they gave their customers one (maybe two?) "free" redlines in any 12-month period. This would help with false-positives, but I don't think it would work for consumer electronics, since a single immersion would cause failure, unlike redlining a car. But I think the damage from false positives could be mitigated via good customer service policy (but now I'm fantasizing, I guess).
First... there is no requirement that the computer cannot be some x*n atoms.
Second... I'm not sure that this would be the case:
It's quite possible that, say, only 1% of the atoms in the brain are required for the brain activity we'd like to simulate. Off the top of my head (ha!) some examples would be those atoms involved in nutrient uptake, metabolism, and waste removal. I'm sure there're also atoms like those that give length to axons... those don't need 1:1 representation, a timed loop could represent them. Or all the neurotransmitters, those atoms could be instead represented by a few bits used as a counter.
Basically, my argument boils down to this: I don't think the goal would be to build a simulacrum of the brain. Just a simulation of the brain. This gives lots of room for making things more efficient (though maintaining accuracy would, of course, be necessary).
Yes, that's the solution. Have your code run on any system, all too willing to be duped by street vendors, and blissfully unaware of the nefarious intentions of the guy waving candy from the back of the BUS.
Oh... you meant running code natively... I see.
Makes sense. He was lamenting how today's slashdot is so much worse than the slashdot of yesteryear.
While we're adding frequent dupes back into the mix, can we also please have Cowbow Neal added back into the poll options? And also please let's go back to constant blogspamming, and take 'ref=nofollow' out of the links.
And that's exactly how much of his post you needed to read to get his message:
1. He uses OO because it doesn't have the ribbon like Office does
2. He doesn't like Office (hence the pejorative).
Seems to me that he communicated quite effectively.
Of course, you can decide that he isn't worth reading because he pokes fun of a product. If that's the case, I feel sorry for you. Plenty of insight is draped in sarcasm or stupid name-calling.
I think the goal had nothing to do with selling manuals, or greater usability, or anything practical.
The goal was to make the new version of Office seem "different" so that people would justify spending lots of cash on it.
Small, incremental, behind-the-scenes upgrades to a product, while truly valuable, just don't get the same "I got something for my money" reaction that a UI change does.
In short, the ribbon was a marketing ploy.
Just to expound on that a bit... there is a logical reason for it.
Letting a bureaucratic patent examiner be the final arbiter of patent claims leaves the potential for errors with far-reaching (for the applicants) consequences, never mind the potential for abuse.
The Patent Office's current practice seems to be "If everything appears to be in order, grant the patent -- any disputes can be settled in court".
The reason this is a somewhat logical approach is because in court, both sides of the dispute have the ability to present their cases, which theoretically results in a fairer result.
The downside, of course, is the cost (both public cost, and the litigants' costs) of hearings and/or trials. As usual, when lawyers write the laws and regulations, lawyers benefit from them.
And while court costs and legal fees have a way of squeezing out the little guy, it's reassuring to me that patents can be argued in court, and applicants aren't *entirely* dependent on the whim of a patent examiner or two.
Try spraying it with acrylic first.
Or using any of the commercial products used to kill bugs without destroying their shape. Hell, a kid's amateur entymology set comes with one of those, when I was a kid it was a liquid in a dropper vial. The stuff worked well, assuming I had the critter in a net first. Then you wait for the liquid to dry, and presto! -- you've got a mountable (and imagable) specimen.
Totally off-topic, I know. But it irks me that when we bring up a display issue, our reflex is to mention our browser AND our operating system.
Just goes to show that we are nowhere near any kind of usable standards for browsers like the kind that's been envisioned for a decade (or more!).
Oh crap. The cat's out of the bag.
Unsubmit! Unsubmit!
It's been said before:
If you're response to an Ask Slashdot submission about $X is "Ask a lawyer about $X", then you should rewrite the Ask Slashdot question in your mind to "What should I know before I talk to a lawyer about $X?"
Lawyers are expensive. Community knowledge can e very helpful in reducing the amount needing to be spend on legal fees, and I'm sure plenty of Slashdotters have good insight that can help the submitter.
For my part, all I can say is that I wouldn't use a doctor if I knew they used Google Apps. There's too much risk that an employee at Google might let loose the secret of my debilitating suppurative penile encrustations.
Every car I've owned has had a practical range of around 300 mi (Ford Ranger, Chevy S-10, Plymouth Voyager, Honda Civic, Toyota Camry). It doesn't invalidate your point, it just makes the 320 km seem a little better.
And FWIW, 320 km is more than a typical person drives in a day... I don't think this is intended as a long-road-trip vehicle, but instead as a daily-use vehicle.
For some snark: That's mostly because current recycling methods are largely composed of shipping the parts to third-world countries where they burn them (NOT in an incinerator) to extract heavy metals.
Seriously, though, if this process does truly result in a significant market for recycling process outputs, it could help make recycling old monitors economically sound. I suspect, however, that it will still be cheaper to make the PVA byproduct from scratch, and ship monitors to developing nations for scrapping.
If in the cloud
The data you keep
The NSA
May get a peek.
Burma shave.
But seriously... Distributed data is now "the cloud"? Is my dirty laundry in "the cloud" because it is scattered in my bedroom?
Good point. I guess that's one of the ways we need to vary the size and location of C.
Much simpler... use a Venn diagram.
Let Circle A be the traveling public.
Let Circle B, intersecting circle A, be terrorists.
Let Circle C, within Circle A, but intersecting Circle B, be the set of those who the test identifies as terrorists.
Any person in Circle C but not in Circle B is a false positive.
Any person in Circle B but not in Circle C is a false negative.
Vary the location and size of Circle C to demonstrate tests of varying accuracy.
This works for terrorists, for cancer, for any test, really. Just wish I could draw it in my post instead of explaining it out.
That's ridiculous. Apple implemented the CMD IDE chip properly. The truth of the matter is that the chip, and the implementation instructions, were changed after the iPod went into production.
.
Multiple sources confirm that the source of the chip and instruction change was no other then Googol the Destroyer, in an effort to stop Joba and Gatus from preventing him from wreaking the End of Days upon the world via the Rite of a Thousand Targeted Ads.
When last we saw our heroes, Gatus and Joba strove to recruit all the world's developers to write the One True OS with Global Search in order to stop Googol; the druid Stallmanx had failed in his efforts to trick Googol into signing away his powers (via a contract written by his attendant Beard Gnomes). Googol was busy devouring data with gobsmacking satisfaction, and weaving his Dark Fibers into the Evil Woven Tapestry of Universe Description, while his evil underlords continue to build the database of all possible ways the world can be saved and developing counterstrategies for them.
Unfortunately for our heroes, it appears that their actions have not gone unnoticed by Googol the Destroyer. Apparantly Joba's subversion of the fashion-conscious developers has gotten under Googol the Destroyer's skin... for now he has provided chipmakers with incendiary devices to be implanted in iPods and Zunes, and threats of zero pagerank if they do not follow his directives.
Both Zunes that have been sold have since blown up, while approximately 15 iPods have blown up in the test phase of "Operation iPlosion". This apparently was less than Googol anticipated, due to the protection of the Reality Distortion Field of iPod users with sufficient devotion to He of the Black Turtleneck
Meanwhile, in Stallmanx's laboratory, his Beard Gnomes have nearly finished the contracts and licenses that may yet save the world from the predations of Googol. Just what lies within those documents?
How will Gatus and Joba recruit the rest of the world's developers? What cunning plan will Googol the Destroyer think of next? Will he overcome the effects of the Reality Distortion Field? Will our heroes be thwarted?
Tune in to next week's episode of Googol the Destroyer to find out!
I welcome these "obvious" Ask Slashdot articles. They are what enables me to convince my employer that slashdot is a work resource that needs to be whitelisted.
Not really... but in case I hear those dreaded words ("What is slashdot.org") come review time... I'll have some defensive ammunition.
God help you?
You've got an excel spreadsheet? You're a lucky bastard.
I have a customized Peoplesoft implementation for asset tracking, designed by three blind goatherds, one of whom also had leprosy (I may be exaggerating a bit. I suspect it was more like twenty, ~since having more people design a system is always a good idea~).
Seriously... Search for asset. Find asset. Enable correct history mode. Click through four forms to get to custodian details. Update custodian details. Run asset update process. Check process monitor for error messages. Resolve errors. Rerun update process. And that's a simple change.
Heaven/Hell forbid there was any issue with the Tag # or Serial # assigned to an asset.
Hell hath no torment like a Peoplesoft implementation used for something it has no business being used for.
Sorry, Here's the link.
:) -- here are the two books in my library relating to patents:
Typo in my HTML again...
While I'm on the subject (and waiting for the timer to allow me to post again
The English Patents of Monopoly: A History by William Hyde Price (heavy economics bent)
Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660-1800
There is plenty of material online about both the English patent system and the American patent system... but the foundations of the American system lie in England and in France.
As for the goals of patents when they were established, I think you need to do some reading.
The original use of patents was purely to grant government-sponsored monopolies, irrespective of invention. Patents were granted in England on spices, on salt, and on other goods. These patents were sold, and were a source of revenue for the Crown. Eventually, due to many complaints, the granting of patents was limited to new inventions.
While the preservation of knowledge was a nice side effect, that's all it was. Here's a link you should read. Choice quote:
Despite what you might have been told in middle school, that is not the case. Patents were created to promote technological advancement by securing a revenue stream for inventors who sell their devices to others. Not to preserve technical knowledge in the event of a catastrophe eliminating the persons with knowledge of a trade secret.
The whole point of a patent is that I can invent a device, and then sell dozens of the devices to other people for them to use. They are forbidden from reverse-engineering the device to make & sell their own, because I hold the patent on it.
It's about preserving the revenue stream for inventors, while ensuring the device actually gets used.
Preservation of knowledge is a nice secondary effect, but the primary effect is promotion of technological advancement.