As someone who works in the biz I can tell you that a handycam+a buz+blender will not get you a movie that looks like it's from the 1980's unless you're comparing with completely CG movies from the 80's! An 'opensource' CG movie might be interesting.
"People are MUCH more willing to buy "the genuine item", especially when it comes to status symbol items, like luxury cars" I run FreeBSD on my laptop and make it as prominently displayed on my desktop as I can. It says that I have taste. It says that I'm not a moron. It gives me kudos among the people whose opinion I care about. And it's FREE! Well...I'm not 100% serious...
The one that gets me is the way the music industry make out that music only exists because there are record companies to pay for it. Like Sony existed for the last 100,000 years and ripping off music is somehow going to make people want to stop singing and become silent. It's amazing what you can make people believe. On the other hand I expect movies to suffer a little with the loss of IP. Movies are expensive to make. Whether that will be significant in the big scheme of things only time can tell.
I'm not arguing that IP isn't property merely because it isn't something physical (ie. don't think I'm some kind of extreme reductionist materialist who refuses to accept the existence of non-material things). "The real reason why IP is going to fail is NOT because the idea is... evil, but... because it's unworkable." Why do you think that's any different from what I am saying? That is exactly what I am saying. (Physical) property rights exist because we have walls and safes and burglar alarms and police forces and brute strength that all make it difficult to take something from someone against their will. Without these kinds of mechanisms there is unlikely to be such a thing as property. I cannot (at the moment at least) envisage equivalent mechanisms working for something that can be reproduced infinitely like information. Hence I expect IP, as a concept, to to take significant damage. I think we agree here. "Thus, IP is a PRIVILEGE, not a RIGHT" Again I agree. But remember what a privilege in fact is. It's something that a bunch of people (backed up by a police force and army), who're able to control your ability to do it, let you do. That's all. "And I for one definitely see disadvantages to it as well as advantage" I completely agree too. IP has granted some benefits. But we mustn't think that IP is some God granted thing that we have a God given right to. (And many atheists act exactly like it *is* some kind of quasi-magical God given thing.)
A lot of people seem to think that intellectual property is like physical property. That you can own it, buy it, sell it. Well they're completely wrong. Owning information makes no sense at all except in a culture whose technology is too primitive to make copying easy. Well those days are over now. It's going to be interesting watching how our culture adapts - especially the effects on an economy that thinks it can control the distribution of information for profit.
Today my wife was so pleased that that I was slaving away in the kitchen cooking her dinner..but then she noticed that every song I had playing in the background was by a different band. Then she noticed the wires coming out of the cupboard. And then the PSU. Oh dear....I was rumbled...she was about to discover that I wasn't playing it from the CD player but from a shell script playing a randomised sequence of mp3's from my laptop discreetly hidden in a cupboard. "Can't I get you away from that damned computer...if only you spent all that time on me...!!!" Trying to explain that it's no different from a CD player which probably has some microcontroller in it anyway was to no avail. It's not easy being a married geek. Ho hum... at least the food came out nice. Yum!
If you want mouse support why don't you just install Windows and use Microsoft Outlook Express. I believe you even have to use a mouse to do C programming or to configure your network under Windows. I'm sure you'll like it.
You're missing the point! People like hacking Linux of $(X)BSD to make it work with their weird and wonderful hardware. Now thay can do that anywhere. There are going to be a lot of happy people!
I think you're supposed to get excited that the book has a signature in it. In fact some people find this so exciting they'd wade through hundreds of thousands of lines of source code for it.
You can't use phase velocity to send information - that much is obvious to anyone who's done any physics. However in this experiment the guy seems to send some Mozart at faster than light. But the reason why is simple - you can approximately predict Mozart's music very well at the microscopic level. In effect that's what the receiver was doing - it was (in a roundabout way) making a prediction of what was about to arrive. As you can approximate music very well with sine waves of frequency no higher than, say, 40KHz, it's trivial to make an accurate prediction of what's going to happen in the next 1/100,000 of a second or so.
't Hooft is also known for the 'Holographic Hypothesis'. This is the bizarre sounding idea that in some way space is 2d rather than 3d and may in fact have a lot of resemblances to a 2d cellular automaton like Conway's Game of Life. Strangely this isn't idle speculation but seems to be built into General Relativity from the beginning. I have a few notes and references at my web site. The papers are a bit technical but the results are cool.
You can't have a photon duplicator. It's not the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle so much as something more fundamental - the "No Clone Theorem". This theorem is what makes Quantum Cryptography work. It also means that when they invent Teleporters people won't be able to make illicit copies of you:-)
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As someone who works in the biz I can tell you that a handycam+a buz+blender will not get you a movie that looks like it's from the 1980's unless you're comparing with completely CG movies from the 80's! An 'opensource' CG movie might be interesting.
"People are MUCH more willing to buy "the genuine item", especially when it comes to status symbol items, like luxury cars" I run FreeBSD on my laptop and make it as prominently displayed on my desktop as I can. It says that I have taste. It says that I'm not a moron. It gives me kudos among the people whose opinion I care about. And it's FREE! Well...I'm not 100% serious...
The one that gets me is the way the music industry make out that music only exists because there are record companies to pay for it. Like Sony existed for the last 100,000 years and ripping off music is somehow going to make people want to stop singing and become silent. It's amazing what you can make people believe. On the other hand I expect movies to suffer a little with the loss of IP. Movies are expensive to make. Whether that will be significant in the big scheme of things only time can tell.
I'm not arguing that IP isn't property merely because it isn't something physical (ie. don't think I'm some kind of extreme reductionist materialist who refuses to accept the existence of non-material things). "The real reason why IP is going to fail is NOT because the idea is ... evil, but ... because it's unworkable." Why do you think that's any different from what I am saying? That is exactly what I am saying. (Physical) property rights exist because we have walls and safes and burglar alarms and police forces and brute strength that all make it difficult to take something from someone against their will. Without these kinds of mechanisms there is unlikely to be such a thing as property. I cannot (at the moment at least) envisage equivalent mechanisms working for something that can be reproduced infinitely like information. Hence I expect IP, as a concept, to to take significant damage. I think we agree here. "Thus, IP is a PRIVILEGE, not a RIGHT" Again I agree. But remember what a privilege in fact is. It's something that a bunch of people (backed up by a police force and army), who're able to control your ability to do it, let you do. That's all. "And I for one definitely see disadvantages to it as well as advantage" I completely agree too. IP has granted some benefits. But we mustn't think that IP is some God granted thing that we have a God given right to. (And many atheists act exactly like it *is* some kind of quasi-magical God given thing.)
A lot of people seem to think that intellectual property is like physical property. That you can own it, buy it, sell it. Well they're completely wrong. Owning information makes no sense at all except in a culture whose technology is too primitive to make copying easy. Well those days are over now. It's going to be interesting watching how our culture adapts - especially the effects on an economy that thinks it can control the distribution of information for profit.
Today my wife was so pleased that that I was slaving away in the kitchen cooking her dinner..but then she noticed that every song I had playing in the background was by a different band. Then she noticed the wires coming out of the cupboard. And then the PSU. Oh dear....I was rumbled...she was about to discover that I wasn't playing it from the CD player but from a shell script playing a randomised sequence of mp3's from my laptop discreetly hidden in a cupboard. "Can't I get you away from that damned computer...if only you spent all that time on me...!!!" Trying to explain that it's no different from a CD player which probably has some microcontroller in it anyway was to no avail. It's not easy being a married geek. Ho hum... at least the food came out nice. Yum!
If you want mouse support why don't you just install Windows and use Microsoft Outlook Express. I believe you even have to use a mouse to do C programming or to configure your network under Windows. I'm sure you'll like it.
You're missing the point! People like hacking Linux of $(X)BSD to make it work with their weird and wonderful hardware. Now thay can do that anywhere. There are going to be a lot of happy people!
I think you're supposed to get excited that the book has a signature in it. In fact some people find this so exciting they'd wade through hundreds of thousands of lines of source code for it.
You can't use phase velocity to send information - that much is obvious to anyone who's done any physics. However in this experiment the guy seems to send some Mozart at faster than light. But the reason why is simple - you can approximately predict Mozart's music very well at the microscopic level. In effect that's what the receiver was doing - it was (in a roundabout way) making a prediction of what was about to arrive. As you can approximate music very well with sine waves of frequency no higher than, say, 40KHz, it's trivial to make an accurate prediction of what's going to happen in the next 1/100,000 of a second or so.
't Hooft is also known for the 'Holographic Hypothesis'. This is the bizarre sounding idea that in some way space is 2d rather than 3d and may in fact have a lot of resemblances to a 2d cellular automaton like Conway's Game of Life. Strangely this isn't idle speculation but seems to be built into General Relativity from the beginning. I have a few notes and references at my web site. The papers are a bit technical but the results are cool.
For some real physics on this subject read the paper on The Ultimate Physical Limits of Computing at http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/9908043
You can't have a photon duplicator. It's not the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle so much as something more fundamental - the "No Clone Theorem". This theorem is what makes Quantum Cryptography work. It also means that when they invent Teleporters people won't be able to make illicit copies of you :-)