Reading about how the radios could not communicate inside of certain buildings I wonder if it might make sense to include an "emergency" channel in wireless networking equipment. After all, many warehouses have wireless access points setup for their mobile inventory devices.
This 802.11 emergency channel that could be activated and used by emergency personell equipped with special radios - kind of a "skype-911".
Now that is an interesting point you make. A bit of reading has led me to wonder if one could indeed not write a novel algorithm for decoding MP3.
Of course, I do not find any examples of an algorithm written to produce a result for which a different algorithm can be created which achieves the same result. But I am by no means an expert in such things - I would be interested to see such an example though.
Now, to clairify - I do not claim that I think a novel algorithm could be written which would be as effecient as the current, proprietary ones. But with modern processing power (even with mobile electronics) it seems a company could afford a less-effecient algorithm so long as that algorithm were original and non-infringing.
This doesn't make sense to me. I mean, I guess it should, but how can one patent a format?
I mean, I can see patenting an algorithm (an original implementation) that allows you to effeciently encode/decode a particular format - or even patenting hardware that works specifically with those formats.
But the format itself?
Why must you pay fees if you develop your very own, original and novel algorithm for decoding the mp3 file format?
I'm just having trouble wrapping my brain around this for some reason.
Patenting a format just feels like patenting a poetic form or something. Sure, you can write an original poem and copyright it, that seems common sense...but claiming the poet must pay licensing just for making their poem a haiku?
Plays and music have, until recent times, been about performance.
I am friends with a signed band, and it seems common knowledge that the artist makes the most money from concerts and live performances (not to mention the merchandise sold at these shows).
For film, I admit it is a bit trickier situation.
You have to offer something that the recorded medium alone does not.
The way I see it, a recording is just a memory, albeit a great memory, but a memory nonetheless.
A great memory will prompt you to recreate the situation which created that memory in the first place.
With movies it seems that the theaters are where the "performance" should take place - and that merchandise would likewise be the actual "bread" the the visual "scent" sells.
Basically, DRM is an attempt to force you to enter the store before you can smell the baking - when it is that very odor that should (and would) bring you into the store in the first place.
The industry should stop viewing the recordings as the product and instead the creators themselves.
You probably have a "communcator" in your pocket right now - don't you?
We have now teleported particles - one at a time, albiet;)
String theory and loop quantum gravity theory don't seem to mind the idea of warp or hyperspace either - but I will admit that those two theories are both pretty fantastic in and of themselves.
I agree, Star Trek is not "hard sci-fi" like Stephen Baxter. But nonetheless, there is a scientific basis for the vast majority of their technologies.
It is nice to think that at least today we KNOW that our myths are made-up.
But there are still some people who manage to insist they are real, actual events! - UFO religions like the Scientologists or heaven's gate.
Nonetheless, despite the fact that our current mythology is fiction, Star Trek and the like are at least Science Fiction: not based upon the supernatural, but instead upon testable, and currently tested theories and ideas.
Amazing: even as culturally advanced as we fancy ourselves, we still retain those ancient urges to believe in the fantastic. But perhaps that's because so much in this universe is actually fantastic; far more, in fact, than we ever imagined.
It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from the late, great Dr. Feynman: "Far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"
But a good deal of what makes a story great are the characters.
Perhaps with good enough AI the idea of writing a "story" will be less about the story-line, and more about the detailed crafting of individual personalities.
This way only half the "story" work is being done by the algoritm. The "drivers" of the story would be exquisitely crafted by writers/designers.
Think about Han Solo, for example. I think he's a fantastic character, and many many stories can stem simply from him as an entity and from the decisions he would make and thus the situations he would find himself in.
I could see then a game where you know the attitude of certain characters, and get to know them as "people". But perhaps with good enough AI, quality procedural stories can emerge simply on account of the strength of the character design.
In fact, I think in this kind of environment where individual actions and decisions affect the "story" that the players own personality would likely have a large impact on the flow of the game. This type of impact would be much subtler than choosing the A-D answers from a menu which make your character simply become more "evil" or "good". The ability to have your personality impact a story would make the game have many shades of personal depth that a human writer could only achieve if he or she knew you personally.
Writing this kind of software?...well, that's what I believe theoretical physicists refer to as, "an engineering problem";)
That is pretty close to what I was thinking about actually. Of course, it does require skype and as you say that is not 'exactly' what I am thinking, as I would like to have a phone which requires no service, aside from internet access, whatsoever.
This is why I would like to see more procedurally generated games.
Games where the actual story is completely different - with different characters generated for each instance.
Imagine a murder-mystery game, for instance. Which takes place in an actual-sized city. Your character waits around the precinct until the call comes in. You travel to the murder scene and it's completely random what happened and how it happened.
In this case, no strategy guide could say, "you should always look for a knife or a gun" because the murder weapon could have been any physical object - instead of a particular "murder_enabled" object. Maybe the murderer used a microwave oven to bludgeon the victim.
A procedural AI would do it's best to cover its tracks, and would learn your particular style of deduction so that the next murderer is even more thorough at cleaning-up.
With the advent of a good physics engine and procedural map-generating algorithm you would have a completely different murder scene every time, in a completely new location.
This could apply to all kinds of games. RPGs where the decision interaction between nobles and generals would dictate political climates and trickle down to direct the individual actions of the NPC AIs.
I certainly hope that Spore is going to be the "Wolfenstein 3D" of the procedurally algorithmic games of the future.
Would it make sense for a hardware company to manufacture a purely IP-based phone which does not connect to the POTs at all? It would be designed to be used in cities which have wireless clouds; kind of like a nextel direct-connect feature.
Call it, "Cityphone" or "Cloudphone".
Sure, you could only use it to communicate with other phones of the same type on IP networks - but I think it could catch on as a handy, low-cost device for intra-city communications.
...in the meantime our entire VMware infrastructure runs on Dell because they are actually busy making sales calls and setting up meetings with my VP;)
Great, more angrying up of my blood.
on
30 Days of DRM
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I am glad that Michael Geist is forcing a very close examanation of the limitations a DCMA - but why is a DCMA even needed in the first place?
In a way it feels like he's discussing ways to make a noose more comfortable and less abrasive to the victims throat.
The thing is, whenever DRM is discussed I cannot help by attempt to prognosticate into the deep mysterious future. Imagine a future (not too distant perhaps) in which we have direct brain interfaces of some sort. How would it be to have certain thoughts blocked? How would it be to not be able to think something?
Thoughtcrime - in other words. Oh, it's disgusting to me.
After all, DRM is basically a way of locking-down information. But information is so close to just thought. It's one step away from a pure idea.
When I hear DRM I think "Idea Stopping" - and being an idealist as I am, this is deeply disturbing to me.
DMCAs are so prehistoric to me - they seem to hail from the time in the past when the distribution of information required printing presses and tape-duplication facilities. When information distribution liked physical mediums for distribution.
In those ancient times of the 20th century only the wealthy could afford these behemoth machines. There was no way a consumer could copy a novel and send it to 20 or 100 of their closest friends.
Of course nowadays I can find the entire works and easily distribute them without all that mucking about with the physical constraints that plagued the old.
DRM and DMCAs seem analogous to a cart and buggy and wagon industry forcing automobile owners to not drive faster than the horse-drawn carriages because of their "right" to the road.
It is old-world philosophy being artificially forced into the modern mindset.
Reading about how a program can find something that a human could not, or would not, brings to mind a notion I had the other day.
I am learning Java (and OO programming best practices in general), and am pretty heavily into it at this point. I was tooling along, writing some code to test some aspects of the language when I suddenly realized that much of what I was typing I was kind of unaware of.
When I had first begun studying in earnest a few months ago I remember how closely I paid attention to the smallest syntactical details. But now that much of this has become wrote I found myself automatically just cruising through - not really conceptualizing what I was doing. But it was still working.
I went back into my little code and delved into a deeper reading of what I had written. It was all correct according to theory - and I could recall all the little subtleties of how Java's VM was interpreting this and that - but while I was writing it I was giving no thought to it. It just happened; it just came out of me.
Now, hearing about these programs that can mine data and find things that human eyes would miss - and relatedly hearing about machines that can invent - I wonder if one day invention, discovery and the like will all be wrote.
I wonder if, like my mindless coding moment, things will just happen - research will just occur - without really a second thought of the "low-level" processes that currently are held so dear.
It's interesting. It might be akin to mathematics in some ways - wherein you can generalize a large body of calculation and come to a conclusion without actually outputting the raw numerical form.
It is an approximation, yes. But with some work the approximation can be decomposed into elementary school level math expressions - if you really want to go through all that work.
But why decompose it, it works fine generalized (much better for humans in fact).
It's interesting to me - this modern high-level generalization.
This brings to mind a conversation I had the other day.
I think the main reason that (F)OSS is still having trouble competing (despite the widespread acceptance amoungst industry experts) is because of budget.
In this case, the budget to get a piece of software properly certified.
There are many aspects of creating software that require non-technical administrative personell to handle. I don't remember ever hearing about OSA (Open Source Accountants);) These people cost money. And it's one thing to freely dedicate your time to devlopment, but it's quite another to freely donate large sums of personal money.
It is truly inpspiring that so many can work together so well towards a common goal, and it is truly stunning to take in the vast amount of software available which is written pretty much completely philanthropically.
But the problem is that few actually get paid to do this, it is done in spare time.
In my conversation I wondered how else software writers could make money, besides the tried and tested subscription and serial-activation systems in widespread use today. How else could programmers, who are doing some of the most mind-bending, skillful crafting of any career, get compensated for their work?
Wouldn't it be great if AMD, Intel, ASUS - or indeed any large electronics manufacturer - would offer up a pool to develop software?
The trick would of course be that the software should of course be standards compliant and thus run even on competitors hardware. But maybe AMD could have a certification that says, "written for and extensively tested on AMD hardware".
Software seems that it should be freely available - it just seems the nature of all information in general - but there is that problem that the programmer needs to make money.
It just seems to me that logically the consumer should buy the hardware - the physical, tangiable thing - and that it should be up to the hardware manufacturers to make hardware as a whole more useful.
Here's the irony in my eyes - right now hardware manufacturers pay Microsoft in order to get a little sticker that says "built for Windows XP".
This doesn't seem right. It seems totally backwards to me.
It reminds me of a quote from "V for Vendetta": "People shouldn't be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people."
In other words, "Harware manufacturers shouldn't be beholden to the software companies, software companies should be beholden to the hardware."
The fact of the matter is that I just wish that after I pay $2,000 for my nice new system that it would run right out of the box. Macintosh is close - but I would have the added stipulation that the software on any hardware system be standards based so that I don't have a Dell OS, IBM OS, HP OS, Alienware OS...etc.
These are just thoughts, and I understand that there are many counterpoints.
Seeing news move this quickly reminds me of the Futurama episode "Time Keeps On Slipping", where time was skipping forward by hours, days and weeks every few minutes.
LINDA:...Turning to entertainment news, teen singer Wendy might just be the latest [Time skips.] LINDA:...won three Grammys last night [Time skips. The picture of Wendy behind her has a "2984 - 3002" caption below it.] LINDA:...found dead in her bathtub.
How much genetic variance is there in a GM crop to it's counterpart as compared to different races of the same species?
Is a GM crop really that radically different than their natural sibling?
I would venture to guess that even the glowing white mice are much more genetically close to their lab family than to a wild brown mouse.
What is the big problem? even if GM crops were to interbreed wouldn't their unique properties eventually be completely (for all intents and purposes) diluted. And if their unique genetics manages to survive and thrive in the "wild", is that not a simple example of natural selection and an indication of their hardiness?
Slashdot Mirror
Reading about how the radios could not communicate inside of certain buildings I wonder if it might make sense to include an "emergency" channel in wireless networking equipment. After all, many warehouses have wireless access points setup for their mobile inventory devices.
This 802.11 emergency channel that could be activated and used by emergency personell equipped with special radios - kind of a "skype-911".
Now that is an interesting point you make. A bit of reading has led me to wonder if one could indeed not write a novel algorithm for decoding MP3.
Of course, I do not find any examples of an algorithm written to produce a result for which a different algorithm can be created which achieves the same result. But I am by no means an expert in such things - I would be interested to see such an example though.
Now, to clairify - I do not claim that I think a novel algorithm could be written which would be as effecient as the current, proprietary ones. But with modern processing power (even with mobile electronics) it seems a company could afford a less-effecient algorithm so long as that algorithm were original and non-infringing.
This doesn't make sense to me. I mean, I guess it should, but how can one patent a format?
I mean, I can see patenting an algorithm (an original implementation) that allows you to effeciently encode/decode a particular format - or even patenting hardware that works specifically with those formats.
But the format itself?
Why must you pay fees if you develop your very own, original and novel algorithm for decoding the mp3 file format?
I'm just having trouble wrapping my brain around this for some reason.
Patenting a format just feels like patenting a poetic form or something. Sure, you can write an original poem and copyright it, that seems common sense...but claiming the poet must pay licensing just for making their poem a haiku?
It just seems absurd to me.
What is this, game-string theory?
Plays and music have, until recent times, been about performance.
I am friends with a signed band, and it seems common knowledge that the artist makes the most money from concerts and live performances (not to mention the merchandise sold at these shows).
For film, I admit it is a bit trickier situation.
You have to offer something that the recorded medium alone does not.
The way I see it, a recording is just a memory, albeit a great memory, but a memory nonetheless.
A great memory will prompt you to recreate the situation which created that memory in the first place.
With movies it seems that the theaters are where the "performance" should take place - and that merchandise would likewise be the actual "bread" the the visual "scent" sells.
Basically, DRM is an attempt to force you to enter the store before you can smell the baking - when it is that very odor that should (and would) bring you into the store in the first place.
The industry should stop viewing the recordings as the product and instead the creators themselves.
I wonder if this geotagging could be combined with this photo tourism technology?
Furthermore, perhaps these photo tourism 3D reconstructions could then be combined with google earth so you could literally browse the planet.
Neato.
Star Trek "priest": "And Scotty beamed them to the Klingon ship, where there would be no tribble at all"
Crowd chants: "All power to the engines!"
You probably have a "communcator" in your pocket right now - don't you?
;)
We have now teleported particles - one at a time, albiet
String theory and loop quantum gravity theory don't seem to mind the idea of warp or hyperspace either - but I will admit that those two theories are both pretty fantastic in and of themselves.
I agree, Star Trek is not "hard sci-fi" like Stephen Baxter. But nonetheless, there is a scientific basis for the vast majority of their technologies.
It is nice to think that at least today we KNOW that our myths are made-up.
But there are still some people who manage to insist they are real, actual events! - UFO religions like the Scientologists or heaven's gate.
Nonetheless, despite the fact that our current mythology is fiction, Star Trek and the like are at least Science Fiction: not based upon the supernatural, but instead upon testable, and currently tested theories and ideas.
Amazing: even as culturally advanced as we fancy ourselves, we still retain those ancient urges to believe in the fantastic. But
perhaps that's because so much in this universe is actually fantastic; far more, in fact, than we ever imagined.
It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from the late, great Dr. Feynman: "Far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the
past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if
he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"
That is a good point.
;)
But a good deal of what makes a story great are the characters.
Perhaps with good enough AI the idea of writing a "story" will be less about the story-line, and more about the detailed crafting of individual personalities.
This way only half the "story" work is being done by the algoritm. The "drivers" of the story would be exquisitely crafted by writers/designers.
Think about Han Solo, for example. I think he's a fantastic character, and many many stories can stem simply from him as an entity and from the decisions he would make and thus the situations he would find himself in.
I could see then a game where you know the attitude of certain characters, and get to know them as "people". But perhaps with good enough AI, quality procedural stories can emerge simply on account of the strength of the character design.
In fact, I think in this kind of environment where individual actions and decisions affect the "story" that the players own personality would likely have a large impact on the flow of the game. This type of impact would be much subtler than choosing the A-D answers from a menu which make your character simply become more "evil" or "good". The ability to have your personality impact a story would make the game have many shades of personal depth that a human writer could only achieve if he or she knew you personally.
Writing this kind of software?...well, that's what I believe theoretical physicists refer to as, "an engineering problem"
Ah.
That is pretty close to what I was thinking about actually. Of course, it does require skype and as you say that is not 'exactly' what I am thinking, as I would like to have a phone which requires no service, aside from internet access, whatsoever.
But that phone is pretty sweet.
Nice find.
This is why I would like to see more procedurally generated games.
Games where the actual story is completely different - with different characters generated for each instance.
Imagine a murder-mystery game, for instance. Which takes place in an actual-sized city. Your character waits around the precinct until the call comes in. You travel to the murder scene and it's completely random what happened and how it happened.
In this case, no strategy guide could say, "you should always look for a knife or a gun" because the murder weapon could have been any physical object - instead of a particular "murder_enabled" object. Maybe the murderer used a microwave oven to bludgeon the victim.
A procedural AI would do it's best to cover its tracks, and would learn your particular style of deduction so that the next murderer is even more thorough at cleaning-up.
With the advent of a good physics engine and procedural map-generating algorithm you would have a completely different murder scene every time, in a completely new location.
This could apply to all kinds of games. RPGs where the decision interaction between nobles and generals would dictate political climates and trickle down to direct the individual actions of the NPC AIs.
I certainly hope that Spore is going to be the "Wolfenstein 3D" of the procedurally algorithmic games of the future.
This made me think.
Would it make sense for a hardware company to manufacture a purely IP-based phone which does not connect to the POTs at all? It would be designed to be used in cities which have wireless clouds; kind of like a nextel direct-connect feature.
Call it, "Cityphone" or "Cloudphone".
Sure, you could only use it to communicate with other phones of the same type on IP networks - but I think it could catch on as a handy, low-cost device for intra-city communications.
they must mean for us to count 0-9
After all, it seems that Wikipedia readers are more interested in much different topics anyhow.
I prefer to call it "misunderstoodware".
Thanks, now I have much more uncertainty about the whole thing!
I think the industry should start wondering who the cat really is.
...in the meantime our entire VMware infrastructure runs on Dell because they are actually busy making sales calls and setting up meetings with my VP ;)
I am glad that Michael Geist is forcing a very close examanation of the limitations a DCMA - but why is a DCMA even needed in the first place?
In a way it feels like he's discussing ways to make a noose more comfortable and less abrasive to the victims throat.
The thing is, whenever DRM is discussed I cannot help by attempt to prognosticate into the deep mysterious future. Imagine a future (not too distant perhaps) in which we have direct brain interfaces of some sort. How would it be to have certain thoughts blocked? How would it be to not be able to think something?
Thoughtcrime - in other words. Oh, it's disgusting to me.
After all, DRM is basically a way of locking-down information. But information is so close to just thought. It's one step away from a pure idea.
When I hear DRM I think "Idea Stopping" - and being an idealist as I am, this is deeply disturbing to me.
DMCAs are so prehistoric to me - they seem to hail from the time in the past when the distribution of information required printing presses and tape-duplication facilities. When information distribution liked physical mediums for distribution.
In those ancient times of the 20th century only the wealthy could afford these behemoth machines. There was no way a consumer could copy a novel and send it to 20 or 100 of their closest friends.
Of course nowadays I can find the entire works and easily distribute them without all that mucking about with the physical constraints that plagued the old.
DRM and DMCAs seem analogous to a cart and buggy and wagon industry forcing automobile owners to not drive faster than the horse-drawn carriages because of their "right" to the road.
It is old-world philosophy being artificially forced into the modern mindset.
Hmm, that's a very good point. Interesting, I never thought of it that way actually.
Reading about how a program can find something that a human could not, or would not, brings to mind a notion I had the other day.
I am learning Java (and OO programming best practices in general), and am pretty heavily into it at this point. I was tooling along, writing some code to test some aspects of the language when I suddenly realized that much of what I was typing I was kind of unaware of.
When I had first begun studying in earnest a few months ago I remember how closely I paid attention to the smallest syntactical details. But now that much of this has become wrote I found myself automatically just cruising through - not really conceptualizing what I was doing. But it was still working.
I went back into my little code and delved into a deeper reading of what I had written. It was all correct according to theory - and I could recall all the little subtleties of how Java's VM was interpreting this and that - but while I was writing it I was giving no thought to it. It just happened; it just came out of me.
Now, hearing about these programs that can mine data and find things that human eyes would miss - and relatedly hearing about machines that can invent - I wonder if one day invention, discovery and the like will all be wrote.
I wonder if, like my mindless coding moment, things will just happen - research will just occur - without really a second thought of the "low-level" processes that currently are held so dear.
It's interesting. It might be akin to mathematics in some ways - wherein you can generalize a large body of calculation and come to a conclusion without actually outputting the raw numerical form.
It is an approximation, yes. But with some work the approximation can be decomposed into elementary school level math expressions - if you really want to go through all that work.
But why decompose it, it works fine generalized (much better for humans in fact).
It's interesting to me - this modern high-level generalization.
This brings to mind a conversation I had the other day.
;) These people cost money. And it's one thing to freely dedicate your time to devlopment, but it's quite another to freely donate large sums of personal money.
I think the main reason that (F)OSS is still having trouble competing (despite the widespread acceptance amoungst industry experts) is because of budget.
In this case, the budget to get a piece of software properly certified.
There are many aspects of creating software that require non-technical administrative personell to handle. I don't remember ever hearing about OSA (Open Source Accountants)
It is truly inpspiring that so many can work together so well towards a common goal, and it is truly stunning to take in the vast amount of software available which is written pretty much completely philanthropically.
But the problem is that few actually get paid to do this, it is done in spare time.
In my conversation I wondered how else software writers could make money, besides the tried and tested subscription and serial-activation systems in widespread use today. How else could programmers, who are doing some of the most mind-bending, skillful crafting of any career, get compensated for their work?
Wouldn't it be great if AMD, Intel, ASUS - or indeed any large electronics manufacturer - would offer up a pool to develop software?
The trick would of course be that the software should of course be standards compliant and thus run even on competitors hardware. But maybe AMD could have a certification that says, "written for and extensively tested on AMD hardware".
Software seems that it should be freely available - it just seems the nature of all information in general - but there is that problem that the programmer needs to make money.
It just seems to me that logically the consumer should buy the hardware - the physical, tangiable thing - and that it should be up to the hardware manufacturers to make hardware as a whole more useful.
Here's the irony in my eyes - right now hardware manufacturers pay Microsoft in order to get a little sticker that says "built for Windows XP".
This doesn't seem right. It seems totally backwards to me.
It reminds me of a quote from "V for Vendetta": "People shouldn't be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people."
In other words, "Harware manufacturers shouldn't be beholden to the software companies, software companies should be beholden to the hardware."
The fact of the matter is that I just wish that after I pay $2,000 for my nice new system that it would run right out of the box. Macintosh is close - but I would have the added stipulation that the software on any hardware system be standards based so that I don't have a Dell OS, IBM OS, HP OS, Alienware OS...etc.
These are just thoughts, and I understand that there are many counterpoints.
Seeing news move this quickly reminds me of the Futurama episode "Time Keeps On Slipping", where time was skipping forward by hours, days and weeks every few minutes.
LINDA:...Turning to entertainment news, teen singer Wendy might just be the latest
[Time skips.]
LINDA:...won three Grammys last night
[Time skips. The picture of Wendy behind her has a "2984 - 3002" caption below it.]
LINDA:...found dead in her bathtub.
How much genetic variance is there in a GM crop to it's counterpart as compared to different races of the same species?
Is a GM crop really that radically different than their natural sibling?
I would venture to guess that even the glowing white mice are much more genetically close to their lab family than to a wild brown mouse.
What is the big problem? even if GM crops were to interbreed wouldn't their unique properties eventually be completely (for all intents and purposes) diluted. And if their unique genetics manages to survive and thrive in the "wild", is that not a simple example of natural selection and an indication of their hardiness?