I don't know if I really understand/agree with the argument that something is amiss when a soundtrack costs as much or more then a movie.
First, up-to-date prices. Amazon.com lists the movie DVD as $18, and the soundtrack as $14.
Now, the DVD is a superset of the soundtrack. It contains the soundtrack, the movie, additional features, and a game.
The argument was about value and price being out of whack for CDs. Would you claim the soundtrack makes up 78% of the value of the entire DVD set ? I think most people would believe the value of the soundtrack was maybe 20% or so of the DVD value. Especially for Harry Potter (I can't offhand recall any of the soundtrack being particularly notable).
Now, here is where market dynamics come in. The CD is a stable market with a monopoly on distribution and collusion amongst distributors. For DVDs, the distributors are trying to get consumers to switch from the old format (VHS) to DVDs by offering more value at competitive prices. This truly allows the consumer to see how the market forces affect the price independently of the value to the consumer.
For music CDs, it is clear the distributors are screwing their consumers.
It's a simple fact that the majority of cost for a CD goes into production and marketing. And that most CDs never even make enough money to recoup what was put into them.
Production costs are now trivial, with the digital age. You no longer need to rent an enormously expensive studio to record and mix music. You can get by with very simple recording equipment and digital mixing. It is so cheap most successful artists put production studios in their homes. It is so cheap that ingenious young musicians do the entire thing in their garage, and mix it on a computer, for total production costs of about $100 (excluding their time). Marketing is the one thing the major labels can provide that is not cheap. But at to your comment that most CDs lose money, this is quite simply false. No one is going to produce CDs that lose money for long.
I am not claiming it cost $1 to make a CD (and I didn't in my prior post either). But production and distribution costs do not come close to justifying the price. Marketing costs do not either. The only justification is collusion, and that is plain and simple.
The price of a new Harry Potter DVD is about $18. The price of the soundtrack CD is about $16. Tell me there is not a mismatch between relative value and price between those two.
They are losing buisiness because they are treating their customers like shit. You dont' treat your customers like shit and stay in buisiness for long. Eventually they must learn the painful lesson that laws can never overpower market forces and customer satisfaction.
This is really it. When CDs came out, prices rose. You could buy the same music on tape cheaper than on CD, in principal because the CD cost more to make. Now, the price differential persists, even though CD production is MUCH cheaper than tapes.
Basically, the RIAA is a large trust agency that insures that all musicians release their music at comparably high prices. Every few years music gets more expensive, even though production, manufacturing, and distribution costs decrease. This is a LARGE antitrust issue that is completely unaddressed. It has gotten so bad that people will willingly illegally download music because its cost is so high relative to its value.
And that is exactly why CD sales are slumping. The cost is higher than the value to consumers. In a reasonable market in which antitrust issues are actually addressed, the RIAA would be broken up, and huge fines levied against the component companies for colluding to take billions of dollars from consumers illegally. Instead, we have Dubya.
Why are Debian users so against adopting something so common for modern OS's? It could could only help their user base.
Debian users are not. If someone wanted to write and maintain a killer installer, I am quite sure Debian would embrace it.
However, Debian's installer, from potato on, has been quite easy to use. I usually install it across the network using a single floppy in about 20 minutes, and then install packages overnight via the network.
The 'slink' installer sucked rocks, and has given Debian installers a bad name.
Debian is a distro in which 99% of all the work is done by volunteers, and no one thinks writing installers is fun. That is why the Debian installer, while being easy to use and highly functional, is not pretty and flashy and come with the option of using the 'redneck' locale for installation prompts.
MS Word format would be fine if they specified it completely and didn't want any royalty for usin it.
Wayull, this is sort of an impossibility. Don't even worry about it, unless MS suggests it as a counter. The Microsoft Office formats allow any COM objects to be included, by calling system libraries to place them on the page. This means anything that uses COM in Windows can be in DOC format.
Documentation of the DOC format is equivalent to documentation of the Windows DCOM !! This target is moving, changes, etc., and includes a LOT of the system libraries. It was intentionally written to be difficult to duplicate.
But, Bruce, the other place you missed the boat (at least as Hal Plotkin wrote about it), is the other MAJOR reason to use open source in government - use of it in programs that exchange data across networks. The use of open source allows choice in security audits of the data - of OUR data. Proprietary solutions rely on the vendor to check the security. With open source, the government can easily do their own audit, or commission a private firm to do it, or trust their vendor.
Also, the use of open source will prevent squirming around the use of open standard formats. If the code used to read/write the format is open, then the format is open and documented.
Don't sell the government short. Open source solutions provide security checking assurances, and standardized document/data format assurances, that are simply not available in closed software. Such a solution should be preferred, ceteris paribus.
Last mile costs and language differences are not really relevant. The US telco's have a stranglehold on the lines used for broadband, and they are charging a lot for it. That is it - monopolies milk their per-user profit margins, and consumers suffer.
Broadband will be getting MORE expensive unless government regulation is used aggressively. Since thie regulation is controlled by a president so stupid he cannot pronounce 'nuclear' properly, the only real chance will be a turnover in 2004.
Here in SF, I have one option for broadband at home - ADSL. Cable modems are beginning to show up, but are not available for me yet. All other options (other than leeching off others 802.11b) are more costly.
The cost, per month, is $50, from PacBell. Of this, $40 is the rental fee to use the same line they had already installed for my phone. Due to government regulation, anyone can be my ISP, as long as they pay PacBell $40 per month to rent the line. This process effectively killed all competition, since the ISP margin is razor-thin, whereas PacBell is raking it in. Now, the ADSL works fine, outages are rare, and service is pretty good (excepting the slow time to get connected after ordering). But if the line rental were $10/month (or even $20/month - about what local phone service costs), I would have something that approached the value I receive. Remember - this uses the SAME LINE that my phone uses.
Recently I visited Japan. The hotel had free high speed access with DHCP. This wasn't even a costly hotel. It is seemingly ubiquitous there. And the blame in the US is a complete lack of appropriate government regulation on the people who own the lines.
The funny thing is, I signed up for DSL 3 years ago, and got a static IP address. Recently I moved, and now I have to use PPPoE - for the same price. That is right, after three years, they offer me worse DSL service for the same price. Something is rotten in Denmark.
Even if you're right, it doesn't affect the value of the post you were commenting - namely the *meaning* of patent laws. They STILL weren't meant to be abused in the way that is being done today. Namely that you don't use the protection util something has already become standard.
There was no deception. Patents were disclosed, known, and awarded before ANY serious use of mp3's occurred. All of the mp3 explosion occurred with full knowledge that this could easily happen. This action by Fraunhofer is in stark contrast to people who push for standards BEFORE disclosing patents.
If you don't like it, don't use the patent. They are not free, you know. Ogg is. Open royalty-free standards are good. Mp3 is not such a standard, nor has it ever been one.
But in a court of law your defense would be that you are not a patent attorney, and that it really takes a patent attorney to assess infringement. And, this actually is standard practice in patent law. So, practically, there is no such thing as willful infringement until the patent licensor sends you a note telling you that you are infringing and that you should stop.
Besides, that is general practice anyway. You patent something, then develop a working model. Lots of people copy it once it is working, and THEN the patent is granted, and then you let them know it was patented and they have to stop or license.
Then, if you fail to stop, and you lose in court, you are gonna get reamed.
No, it says that by as a matter of principle never checking for patent infringement for solutions you've come up with independently, you are protecting yourself from the possible charge of infringement. This is really a case where ignorance is, if not bliss, the basis of a good case against a bad patent.
This statement is just not true. You don't have to know about a patent to violate it. Copyright is different - you DO have to know about a copyrighted material to infringe, and often demonstrating an infringer knew of the material is critical in court.
While I agree that the government needs a certain level of transparency, I don't think that this transparency should filter down to every level of their orgainization. Does the public have a RIGHT to know the government's network infrastructure? Does the public have a RIGHT to know what data is on every civil servant's hard drive? I think not.
I wouldn't argue that either. But, open source allows the government to conduct security audits of its own software. Or, they can commission a security company to do it (an INDEPENDENT company). Or, they can trust their vendor. Their choice.
Also, standard formats MUST be used at ALL levels. This lesson is important not only for the government (which is why it should be legislated), but also for companies. What this does is make data exchange OS agnostic. It commoditizes the operating system, and thus ensures competition. Anyone can provide a solution. And documents are permanently readable (like old TeX papers), and not gone forever (like early Word documents).
Complete transparency is not really the issue. Document permanency, freedom to perform or commision security audits on the source code, and operating system agnostics are the issue. Let the government dictate the playing field, and allow all comers to field candidate software. The US government is easily a large enough software consumer to force this on software producers.
There are people in Government too, should they not be allow to choose whatever suits their job best? If someone found a VB application that does exactly what they want it to do, why should they be forced to use something that doesn't fit their needs correctly because it runs on a closed source system? Its unfair.
Not really. The biggest issue to me is permanence of electronic formats. I can't read things I wrote 10 years ago - papers, documents, etc, b/c I just cannot find a machine that can read their format (Word 2.0).
I think the government should use open source software wherever there is choice, and contribute heavily to open source development for applications where no good open source app exists. I think this because it ensures that the gov't software's security and interoperability can be verified by any interested parties. The data formats can be operating system agnostic. The software can work in all ways for the good of the people.
This is NOT a move against any companies - any company should be free to provide an open source solution to the government's problems. And, the government can either do its own security audit, or check the security with another independent company, or the same company. There is more than one way to do it.
Because, when it comes right down to it, do you trust current properietary software to secure our nation's secrets ?
How are CMYK colors displayed properly on a RGB monitor that they use to work with? What percentage of quality are we losing from the RGB -> CMYK conversion?
Well, CMYK is actually a smaller colorspace than RGB, so we DO lose quality. However, CMYK is closer to looks the same everywhere and is as such the standard of the print industry. As a scientist, every color figure I make must be converted to CMYK to be used, or else I have to send in hard copies, which they scan into CMYK.
Considering that print rags are becoming outdated, is this really that important?
Yes. Linux (and GIMP) will be useless for pre-press work until the CMYK thing is worked out. And that is HUGE. Many online publishers (most?) still produce paper versions, and use CMYK for both. Don't underestimate it - GIMP having real CMYK support would be an enormous advance for GIMP and for linux.
I doubt this would work for someone blind from birth. The optical pathways have to potentiate pretty early, by age 5 at the latest, or they won't ever be useful. Same thing happens with deafness, IIRC; if you've been totally deaf since birth then an implant won't help.
The first cochlear implant patient was deaf from birth. She had one stimulating electrode (which will never allow one to hear much, but you can certainly hear footsteps, or a door slam, etc, and that first step is REALLY important).
Anyway, back to the point. Stimulation initially caused a somatic sensation - like someone was pushing on her ear. It took some time before she reported anything like a sound percept. Ultimately she decided she liked life better without the implant, but it was not because it didn't provide her nervous system with access to new information.
In the case of the article, though, I am more doubtful. Surface or even intra-cortical stimulation almost never results in percepts that humans report as normal. In somatosensory pathways, it causes numbness or tingling. In visual pathways, it causes phosphenes. There may be something the patient could use there, but it will not be similar to normal vision.
Of course, the whole point is really providing something useful for the patient at this point. Cochlear implants have been around for 25 years, but it took about 15 to create pretty good ones that allowed speech communication.
This device is a God-damned miracle, my jaded brother. The article was about the author's personal reaction to something truly amazing.
I dunno bout that. This device has been around for a long time - the capabilities have existed for about 25 years. Stimulate and the subject sees phosphenes. Kinda like a warped Far Side in which the neurosurgeon is just poking around and watching what happens. What - another grand mal seizure - damn - turn the current down again.
Now, something that was a USEFUL visual prosthetic would be a God-damned miracle. But those do not exist yet. But they will - soon.
There might be quite some blind guys in the world who would like to pay this to see just one frame in their entire life...
Right. That is what makes this research possible - eager guinea pigs. A person blind from birth would give a lot of his resources to be able to see, even if experimental, even if only temporary. Any signal based on 400-700 nm EMF is better than none. The first cochlear implants had one electrode. They improved the patients' lives. Now they come with 16 electrodes, and allow people to communicate with speech. Retinal implants will follow in the next two decades, maybe faster if the current people working on it get a lot better fast.
Don't you think it would be better to ask a doctor or other medical professional than a bunch of computer nerds?
I'd recommend children's reading aids - like "Hooked on phonics" type stuff. Use the auditory portion - and do whatever you can to avoid relying on your vision. If you want something more powerful, try FastForWord from the Scientific Learning Corp. This program helps language learning impaired children learn the toughest elements of language perception - the rapid transition phonemes (like a/ba/ vs/da/ distinction).
This computer nerd works in the lab that generated the research that led to FastForword, and before that created the first US designed cochlear implants (and no, I was not involved in either project).
This pamphlet had a good effect. Gov'r. Thomas was so pleas'd with the construction of this stove, as described in it, that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declin'd it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz., That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.
1) Install xine, use it as the default for quicktime movies in your browser. This default works for most things.
2) Install WINE and use it to play other stuff encoded in the latest and greatest proprietary formats that only the real QuickTime understands.
Also, you could substitute mplayer for xine and get the same success rate.
Out-compete - not really relevant
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Open-Source Biology
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Can a band of biologists who share data freely out-innovate the corporate researchers who hoard it?"
Competition is sometimes relevant, but not in general. The scientist seeks to further the knowledge base, to reinforce his hypotheses, and their sub-hypotheses, etc. The corporation wants to make money.
Now, the scientist, in his quest to further knowledge, has no responsibility to avoid the intellectual property of others. If something is copyrighted, he cites it. If something is patented, he uses it anyway for research, with no necessity to pay to use the patent (unless, of course, there is no other way to get the invention).
The corporation, in its quest to make more money, need not even establish that something will work before it can establish IP. Knowledge is not directly relevant - they only need to set up tolls on the highway to commerce in the form of patents and copyright.
Sometimes, conflict exists. Celera is patenting genes, but only if they find them before NIH (which makes their database public). But in general the goals are different, patents can come from the work of scientists without interfering in the future work of the scientist (it is important to avoid conflicts of interest, usually by the scientist having no control or material interest in patent licensing - this is often not the case), and corporations establish their tolls without even paying attention to knowledge.
That is exactly where I kinda thought he was making it all up. I actually use Debian unstable at work, and upgrade regularly.
Yes, there have been about 2-3 hiccups per year, but it is really nothing that someone who can set up RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, and SuSE cannot handle pretty easily. The truth is that Debian unstable is still more stable than most other distros.
I also agree about Mac OS X. I would definitely check it out before going Microsoft. It can run Microsoft Office, and it has an X server (Darwin), and it makes multimedia trivial (especially, for me, simple home digital movies).
These are EEG recordings. They placed scalp electrodes on the heads of these people while playing and not playing video games. The vast majority of these signals are close to 10 Hz, as was seen in the subjects.
The differences occur in the higher frequency range. These ranges are associated with strenuous attentional focus, and were highest in normals, near zero in heavy game players.
All this is restricted to prefrontal areas, which are the highest abstractest most creative planning areas.
Also, this is being presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference, so it is quite possible VERY preliminary.
Re:You folks don't no sh*t about patent law
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MS Palladium Patent
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· Score: 2
The real requirement is that if you create 'art' that uses the invention (patent), you have one year to file a patent application. Otherwise, your prior art makes the invention public domain.
If someone else creates 'art' that uses a new invention, and this art is disclosed (such as publication of a paper, posting to Usenet even...), then only that someone can attempt to patent that invention from that day forward. And, only within the first year.
Here is a formula for determining damages. Actual Damages Actual Damages and Profits.-The copyright owner is entitled to recover the actual damages suffered by him or her as a result of the infringement, and any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement and are not taken into account in computing the actual damages. In establishing the infringer's profits, the copyright owner is required to present proof only of the infringer's gross revenue, and the infringer is required to prove his or her deductible expenses and the elements of profit attributable to factors other than the copyrighted work.
Statutory damages In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000.
Of course, they have to front the money for the lawyer to investigate and pursue you, so you better be worth some $$ to them. I somehow think that the RIAA will pursue statutory damages, as file sharers are not making any cash from the endeavor. It could end up costing the RIAA a lot more to pursue than they will recover from settlements. I guess they are betting their revenues will rise when they knock out the supernodes.
Somehow I think slashing their prices would be a better idea...
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I don't know if I really understand/agree with the argument that something is amiss when a soundtrack costs as much or more then a movie.
First, up-to-date prices. Amazon.com lists the movie DVD as $18, and the soundtrack as $14.
Now, the DVD is a superset of the soundtrack. It contains the soundtrack, the movie, additional features, and a game.
The argument was about value and price being out of whack for CDs. Would you claim the soundtrack makes up 78% of the value of the entire DVD set ? I think most people would believe the value of the soundtrack was maybe 20% or so of the DVD value. Especially for Harry Potter (I can't offhand recall any of the soundtrack being particularly notable).
Now, here is where market dynamics come in. The CD is a stable market with a monopoly on distribution and collusion amongst distributors. For DVDs, the distributors are trying to get consumers to switch from the old format (VHS) to DVDs by offering more value at competitive prices. This truly allows the consumer to see how the market forces affect the price independently of the value to the consumer.
For music CDs, it is clear the distributors are screwing their consumers.
It's a simple fact that the majority of cost for a CD goes into production and marketing. And that most CDs never even make enough money to recoup what was put into them.
Production costs are now trivial, with the digital age. You no longer need to rent an enormously expensive studio to record and mix music. You can get by with very simple recording equipment and digital mixing. It is so cheap most successful artists put production studios in their homes. It is so cheap that ingenious young musicians do the entire thing in their garage, and mix it on a computer, for total production costs of about $100 (excluding their time). Marketing is the one thing the major labels can provide that is not cheap. But at to your comment that most CDs lose money, this is quite simply false. No one is going to produce CDs that lose money for long.
I am not claiming it cost $1 to make a CD (and I didn't in my prior post either). But production and distribution costs do not come close to justifying the price. Marketing costs do not either. The only justification is collusion, and that is plain and simple.
The price of a new Harry Potter DVD is about $18. The price of the soundtrack CD is about $16. Tell me there is not a mismatch between relative value and price between those two.
They are losing buisiness because they are treating their customers like shit. You dont' treat your customers like shit and stay in buisiness for long. Eventually they must learn the painful lesson that laws can never overpower market forces and customer satisfaction.
This is really it. When CDs came out, prices rose. You could buy the same music on tape cheaper than on CD, in principal because the CD cost more to make. Now, the price differential persists, even though CD production is MUCH cheaper than tapes.
Basically, the RIAA is a large trust agency that insures that all musicians release their music at comparably high prices. Every few years music gets more expensive, even though production, manufacturing, and distribution costs decrease. This is a LARGE antitrust issue that is completely unaddressed. It has gotten so bad that people will willingly illegally download music because its cost is so high relative to its value.
And that is exactly why CD sales are slumping. The cost is higher than the value to consumers. In a reasonable market in which antitrust issues are actually addressed, the RIAA would be broken up, and huge fines levied against the component companies for colluding to take billions of dollars from consumers illegally. Instead, we have Dubya.
Why are Debian users so against adopting something so common for modern OS's? It could could only help their user base.
Debian users are not. If someone wanted to write and maintain a killer installer, I am quite sure Debian would embrace it.
However, Debian's installer, from potato on, has been quite easy to use. I usually install it across the network using a single floppy in about 20 minutes, and then install packages overnight via the network.
The 'slink' installer sucked rocks, and has given Debian installers a bad name.
Debian is a distro in which 99% of all the work is done by volunteers, and no one thinks writing installers is fun. That is why the Debian installer, while being easy to use and highly functional, is not pretty and flashy and come with the option of using the 'redneck' locale for installation prompts.
MS Word format would be fine if they specified it completely and didn't want any royalty for usin it.
Wayull, this is sort of an impossibility. Don't even worry about it, unless MS suggests it as a counter. The Microsoft Office formats allow any COM objects to be included, by calling system libraries to place them on the page. This means anything that uses COM in Windows can be in DOC format.
Documentation of the DOC format is equivalent to documentation of the Windows DCOM !! This target is moving, changes, etc., and includes a LOT of the system libraries. It was intentionally written to be difficult to duplicate.
But, Bruce, the other place you missed the boat (at least as Hal Plotkin wrote about it), is the other MAJOR reason to use open source in government - use of it in programs that exchange data across networks. The use of open source allows choice in security audits of the data - of OUR data. Proprietary solutions rely on the vendor to check the security. With open source, the government can easily do their own audit, or commission a private firm to do it, or trust their vendor.
Also, the use of open source will prevent squirming around the use of open standard formats. If the code used to read/write the format is open, then the format is open and documented.
Don't sell the government short. Open source solutions provide security checking assurances, and standardized document/data format assurances, that are simply not available in closed software. Such a solution should be preferred, ceteris paribus.
Last mile costs and language differences are not really relevant. The US telco's have a stranglehold on the lines used for broadband, and they are charging a lot for it. That is it - monopolies milk their per-user profit margins, and consumers suffer.
Broadband will be getting MORE expensive unless government regulation is used aggressively. Since thie regulation is controlled by a president so stupid he cannot pronounce 'nuclear' properly, the only real chance will be a turnover in 2004.
Here in SF, I have one option for broadband at home - ADSL. Cable modems are beginning to show up, but are not available for me yet. All other options (other than leeching off others 802.11b) are more costly.
The cost, per month, is $50, from PacBell. Of this, $40 is the rental fee to use the same line they had already installed for my phone. Due to government regulation, anyone can be my ISP, as long as they pay PacBell $40 per month to rent the line. This process effectively killed all competition, since the ISP margin is razor-thin, whereas PacBell is raking it in. Now, the ADSL works fine, outages are rare, and service is pretty good (excepting the slow time to get connected after ordering). But if the line rental were $10/month (or even $20/month - about what local phone service costs), I would have something that approached the value I receive. Remember - this uses the SAME LINE that my phone uses.
Recently I visited Japan. The hotel had free high speed access with DHCP. This wasn't even a costly hotel. It is seemingly ubiquitous there. And the blame in the US is a complete lack of appropriate government regulation on the people who own the lines.
The funny thing is, I signed up for DSL 3 years ago, and got a static IP address. Recently I moved, and now I have to use PPPoE - for the same price. That is right, after three years, they offer me worse DSL service for the same price. Something is rotten in Denmark.
Even if you're right, it doesn't affect the value of the post you were commenting - namely the *meaning* of patent laws. They STILL weren't meant to be abused in the way that is being done today. Namely that you don't use the protection util something has already become standard.
There was no deception. Patents were disclosed, known, and awarded before ANY serious use of mp3's occurred. All of the mp3 explosion occurred with full knowledge that this could easily happen. This action by Fraunhofer is in stark contrast to people who push for standards BEFORE disclosing patents.
If you don't like it, don't use the patent. They are not free, you know. Ogg is. Open royalty-free standards are good. Mp3 is not such a standard, nor has it ever been one.
Patent enforcement need not be consistent or pro-active. LAME attempts to work-around patents by only distributing source code, not binaries.
We'll see how long that lasts.
But in a court of law your defense would be that you are not a patent attorney, and that it really takes a patent attorney to assess infringement. And, this actually is standard practice in patent law. So, practically, there is no such thing as willful infringement until the patent licensor sends you a note telling you that you are infringing and that you should stop.
Besides, that is general practice anyway. You patent something, then develop a working model. Lots of people copy it once it is working, and THEN the patent is granted, and then you let them know it was patented and they have to stop or license.
Then, if you fail to stop, and you lose in court, you are gonna get reamed.
No, it says that by as a matter of principle never checking for patent infringement for solutions you've come up with independently, you are protecting yourself from the possible charge of infringement. This is really a case where ignorance is, if not bliss, the basis of a good case against a bad patent.
This statement is just not true. You don't have to know about a patent to violate it. Copyright is different - you DO have to know about a copyrighted material to infringe, and often demonstrating an infringer knew of the material is critical in court.
While I agree that the government needs a certain level of transparency, I don't think that this transparency should filter down to every level of their orgainization. Does the public have a RIGHT to know the government's network infrastructure? Does the public have a RIGHT to know what data is on every civil servant's hard drive? I think not.
I wouldn't argue that either. But, open source allows the government to conduct security audits of its own software. Or, they can commission a security company to do it (an INDEPENDENT company). Or, they can trust their vendor. Their choice.
Also, standard formats MUST be used at ALL levels. This lesson is important not only for the government (which is why it should be legislated), but also for companies. What this does is make data exchange OS agnostic. It commoditizes the operating system, and thus ensures competition. Anyone can provide a solution. And documents are permanently readable (like old TeX papers), and not gone forever (like early Word documents).
Complete transparency is not really the issue. Document permanency, freedom to perform or commision security audits on the source code, and operating system agnostics are the issue. Let the government dictate the playing field, and allow all comers to field candidate software. The US government is easily a large enough software consumer to force this on software producers.
And EVERY CITIZEN would benefit.
There are people in Government too, should they not be allow to choose whatever suits their job best? If someone found a VB application that does exactly what they want it to do, why should they be forced to use something that doesn't fit their needs correctly because it runs on a closed source system? Its unfair.
Not really. The biggest issue to me is permanence of electronic formats. I can't read things I wrote 10 years ago - papers, documents, etc, b/c I just cannot find a machine that can read their format (Word 2.0).
I think the government should use open source software wherever there is choice, and contribute heavily to open source development for applications where no good open source app exists. I think this because it ensures that the gov't software's security and interoperability can be verified by any interested parties. The data formats can be operating system agnostic. The software can work in all ways for the good of the people.
This is NOT a move against any companies - any company should be free to provide an open source solution to the government's problems. And, the government can either do its own security audit, or check the security with another independent company, or the same company. There is more than one way to do it.
Because, when it comes right down to it, do you trust current properietary software to secure our nation's secrets ?
How are CMYK colors displayed properly on a RGB monitor that they use to work with? What percentage of quality are we losing from the RGB -> CMYK conversion?
Well, CMYK is actually a smaller colorspace than RGB, so we DO lose quality. However, CMYK is closer to looks the same everywhere and is as such the standard of the print industry. As a scientist, every color figure I make must be converted to CMYK to be used, or else I have to send in hard copies, which they scan into CMYK.
Considering that print rags are becoming outdated, is this really that important?
Yes. Linux (and GIMP) will be useless for pre-press work until the CMYK thing is worked out. And that is HUGE. Many online publishers (most?) still produce paper versions, and use CMYK for both. Don't underestimate it - GIMP having real CMYK support would be an enormous advance for GIMP and for linux.
I doubt this would work for someone blind from birth. The optical pathways have to potentiate pretty early, by age 5 at the latest, or they won't ever be useful. Same thing happens with deafness, IIRC; if you've been totally deaf since birth then an implant won't help.
The first cochlear implant patient was deaf from birth. She had one stimulating electrode (which will never allow one to hear much, but you can certainly hear footsteps, or a door slam, etc, and that first step is REALLY important).
Anyway, back to the point. Stimulation initially caused a somatic sensation - like someone was pushing on her ear. It took some time before she reported anything like a sound percept. Ultimately she decided she liked life better without the implant, but it was not because it didn't provide her nervous system with access to new information.
In the case of the article, though, I am more doubtful. Surface or even intra-cortical stimulation almost never results in percepts that humans report as normal. In somatosensory pathways, it causes numbness or tingling. In visual pathways, it causes phosphenes. There may be something the patient could use there, but it will not be similar to normal vision.
Of course, the whole point is really providing something useful for the patient at this point. Cochlear implants have been around for 25 years, but it took about 15 to create pretty good ones that allowed speech communication.
This device is a God-damned miracle, my jaded brother. The article was about the author's personal reaction to something truly amazing.
I dunno bout that. This device has been around for a long time - the capabilities have existed for about 25 years. Stimulate and the subject sees phosphenes. Kinda like a warped Far Side in which the neurosurgeon is just poking around and watching what happens. What - another grand mal seizure - damn - turn the current down again.
Now, something that was a USEFUL visual prosthetic would be a God-damned miracle. But those do not exist yet. But they will - soon.
There might be quite some blind guys in the world who would like to pay this to see just one frame in their entire life...
Right. That is what makes this research possible - eager guinea pigs. A person blind from birth would give a lot of his resources to be able to see, even if experimental, even if only temporary. Any signal based on 400-700 nm EMF is better than none. The first cochlear implants had one electrode. They improved the patients' lives. Now they come with 16 electrodes, and allow people to communicate with speech. Retinal implants will follow in the next two decades, maybe faster if the current people working on it get a lot better fast.
Don't you think it would be better to ask a doctor or other medical professional than a bunch of computer nerds?
/ba/ vs /da/ distinction).
I'd recommend children's reading aids - like "Hooked on phonics" type stuff. Use the auditory portion - and do whatever you can to avoid relying on your vision. If you want something more powerful, try FastForWord from the Scientific Learning Corp. This program helps language learning impaired children learn the toughest elements of language perception - the rapid transition phonemes (like a
This computer nerd works in the lab that generated the research that led to FastForword, and before that created the first US designed cochlear implants (and no, I was not involved in either project).
His more full quote
This pamphlet had a good effect. Gov'r. Thomas was so pleas'd with the construction of this stove, as described in it, that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declin'd it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz., That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.
1) Install xine, use it as the default for quicktime movies in your browser. This default works for most
things.
2) Install WINE and use it to play other stuff encoded in the latest and greatest proprietary formats that only the real QuickTime understands.
Also, you could substitute mplayer for xine and get the same success rate.
Can a band of biologists who share data freely out-innovate the corporate researchers who hoard it?"
Competition is sometimes relevant, but not in general. The scientist seeks to further the knowledge base, to reinforce his hypotheses, and their sub-hypotheses, etc. The corporation wants to make money.
Now, the scientist, in his quest to further knowledge, has no responsibility to avoid the intellectual property of others. If something is copyrighted, he cites it. If something is patented, he uses it anyway for research, with no necessity to pay to use the patent (unless, of course, there is no other way to get the invention).
The corporation, in its quest to make more money, need not even establish that something will work before it can establish IP. Knowledge is not directly relevant - they only need to set up tolls on the highway to commerce in the form of patents and copyright.
Sometimes, conflict exists. Celera is patenting genes, but only if they find them before NIH (which makes their database public). But in general the goals are different, patents can come from the work of scientists without interfering in the future work of the scientist (it is important to avoid conflicts of interest, usually by the scientist having no control or material interest in patent licensing - this is often not the case), and corporations establish their tolls without even paying attention to knowledge.
That is exactly where I kinda thought he was making it all up. I actually use Debian unstable at work, and upgrade regularly.
Yes, there have been about 2-3 hiccups per year, but it is really nothing that someone who can set up RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, and SuSE cannot handle pretty easily. The truth is that Debian unstable is still more stable than most other distros.
I also agree about Mac OS X. I would definitely check it out before going Microsoft. It can run Microsoft Office, and it has an X server (Darwin), and it makes multimedia trivial (especially, for me, simple home digital movies).
These are EEG recordings. They placed scalp electrodes on the heads of these people while playing and not playing video games. The vast majority of these signals are close to 10 Hz, as was seen in the subjects.
The differences occur in the higher frequency range. These ranges are associated with strenuous attentional focus, and were highest in normals, near zero in heavy game players.
All this is restricted to prefrontal areas, which are the highest abstractest most creative planning areas.
WAY blown out of proportion.
Some background on brain waves from EEG
Also, this is being presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference, so it is quite possible VERY preliminary.
The real requirement is that if you create 'art' that uses the invention (patent), you have one year to file a patent application. Otherwise, your prior art makes the invention public domain.
If someone else creates 'art' that uses a new invention, and this art is disclosed (such as publication of a paper, posting to Usenet even...), then only that someone can attempt to patent that invention from that day forward. And, only within the first year.
Here is a formula for determining damages.
Actual Damages
Actual Damages and Profits.-The copyright owner is entitled to recover the actual damages suffered by him or her as a result of the infringement, and any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement and are not taken into account in computing the actual damages. In establishing the infringer's profits, the copyright owner is required to present proof only of the infringer's gross revenue, and the infringer is required to prove his or her deductible expenses and the elements of profit attributable to factors other than the copyrighted work.
Statutory damages
In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000.
Oh yeah, they get to impound your computer, too.Copyright law on damages
Of course, they have to front the money for the lawyer to investigate and pursue you, so you better be worth some $$ to them. I somehow think that the RIAA will pursue statutory damages, as file sharers are not making any cash from the endeavor. It could end up costing the RIAA a lot more to pursue than they will recover from settlements. I guess they are betting their revenues will rise when they knock out the supernodes.
Somehow I think slashing their prices would be a better idea...