Cut off the spines (a hacksaw works well) and drop them in a page feed scanner.
Interestinglr enough this process works. A few years ago now, when I was in university, a friend of mone was looking for a large repository of english prose from which to draw conclusions about his hypothesis regarding aspects of natural language processing.
Anyway, there was a certain dictionary company that was willing to provide their five million word dictionary for some exorbitant cost. When I discovered that another friend of mine working at the dictionary published by my university had a twenty million word database of actual prose that he collected by "cutting the spiones of books and dropping them in a page feed scanner". Whilst omnipage was abou the only decent OCR at the time the field now is probably more extensive.
My friend got to use the 20 million word dictionary for nada, as long as he helped the dictionary guys out with a bit of coding from time to time. Nice huh. Sharing is such a beautiful thing.
I recall reading that something like 87% of our information comes from the visual channel. If we assume that _all_ of the rest comes aurally then one would at least expect visual means of human input to be 6 - 7 times more effective. And that is without considering the implications of the amount of data that can be presented visually. The old addage "A picture is worth a thousand words" rings true here.
A friend of mine got into authoring (of presentations, you know, kiosk displays, videos etc) back in the early nineties and what was interesting to me was that one could provide a representation of the audio track in a visual sense that made editing and splicing really quite convenient, the classic waveform graph. But no such mechanism was around for the video track.
The reason that this worked was that the static representation of the audio could be present so easily within one instant of 2d pictorial bandwidth, ie the picture of the waveform was enough to show what you needed to know about it. This low bandwidth characteristic is the problem with audio as a human input in that it decays too quickly. If the computer tells you fact X, if you want to recheck it, or ensure that it was suffciently differnt to fact Y you have to have the computer keep repeating them both.
It is the combination of persistence and bandwidth that means that visual input to humans will always win. I suspect that even if we are able to interface directly with the brain we will have to control such interfaces via metaphor that the brain can handle and the visual is the highest bandwidth we have at our disposal.
As for output from humans, verbal is excellent for exactly the same reasons that it is bad as input. It acts at a distance, and it decays, the instruction once verbalised will be gone once the sound energy dissapates. The idea that oral instruction of machines should be via use of explicit instructions such as "italicise this" or "scroll down" is naive. The richness of verbal communication, even without analysis of tone or subtext, is such that the real benefit is in conveying from human to machine, commonly understood processes "Begin dictation, blah blah blah, [emphasis|indent|strike|... that last [word|sentence|...]" and the like.
the problem is that the globalisation did not go far enough. Bretton woods was designed to create an environment where the natural efficiencies of different regions should prosper. But unfortunately many governements lacked the courage to acknowledge (perhaps for good reason perhaps not) that, for example, not every country needed a car industry or that grain producers in Europe should be able to compete with farms the size of switzerland in Australia. So barriers to trade were created and capital did not flow to the third world to precisey exploit the beefits that their cheaper labour bring. Expanding yhe use of cheap labour in the thord world is the most efficient way of raising the costs of that labour to the extent that it is comparable with local insudtry. The fact that tariffs still exist impede this natural flow and create the inefficiencies that lead to the continuing mis match of labour price.
But bear in mind, if you read the entire thing, it doesn't talk about putting Linux on every public sector PC.
On the contrary, what this episode about is sooo much more important than linux on the desktop. That _even_ if MS still sell product to public institutions in Peru, they must do so in a way that is so libre that it does my heart good.
I ranted at some friends today about howt the RIAA and MPAA are screwing us all daily and the software industry is the same. I have oft wondered where are the great legal philosophers of this age, the Hobbes, Locke or Bentham of the information revolution. This man might be one such and to be reminded of his position is a good thing (thanks for the repost). I hope that such elegance is as infectious as the ideas of property were to the industrial revolution that time.
I was always disappointed with Matrix one in one respect (I enjoyed the film overall however, perhaps because of all the Sydney locations, that was a nice care package for an ex pat:-) I would have preferred if Neo had discovered his latent powers more "accidently".
For example in the initial "jump" scene, that noone ever makes first time, if he had made it by almost making it naturally and then "bending" the building by accident. You know doing extraordinry things but subconsciously. It would have carried quite a nice twist. It would aslo have allowed them to conclude the film without granting Neo control over his powers, making the subsequent franchise more interesting.
One of the problems of winged vehicles is the effect of catestrophic propulsion failure. In a train or a truck if your engine fails you stop moving but the cargo is still in tact. In a winged vehicle a power failure will result in a loss of cargo, if not at the bottom of the ocean then almost certainly all over the surface of it.
Whilst the same is true for passenger flights, to some extent the econmics of cargo (particulalry if one increases the size of a WIG vehicle to make it cargo viable) mean that suxh failures (or the risk thereof) make it impossible to use as a platform.
In general, I pretty much agree with you. I would go further, IP is bunk, but regardless regioning in the media industry (DVDs) should be a crime. And yet I still buy DVDs, because I am weak and I love film. But no more. I will vote against these moguls with my dollars. I do not care about the "oh but they will a) not care b) use it as evidence of piracy". Enough is enough. Live by conscience and demonstrate by example.
I used to think that the 2nd amendment was to stop the federal government from impinging on the states creating militia, and that that _must_ have been the intention of the "fouding fathers" (I am not an American BTW). But I found some writings from Madison and Jefferson, which state unequivicolly that citizens with guns is the best way to keep the government in check. That's a pretty clear statement of intention.
It is clear that the constitutional provision is designed to stop the government from diarming the populace. Now, do not misunderstand, I do not believe that an armed poulace is a good thing, but one cannot legitimately read the US constitution other than to allow gun ownership.
As an aside, the other problem that "gun liberationist" will have is that the ammendment is effectively prefaced with the "congress shall pass no law that..." clause. What the states do is well beyond the control of the constitution. This is where most of the gun control comes. Sorry.
You raise some interesting points, with most of which I disagree, but when you say, in response to your point (2)
Ownership might complicate things a little at Blockbuster: A return would have to be architected as a repurchase of the IP instead of merely returning a rental.
you are creating a rod for your own back. Rental is fine under your regime. Rental (leasing etc) exists in the "real", private propoerty world already, under your regime, Blockbuster would have the same facility. (This point is at the root of why I disagree with your regime)
It is the end of "distribution" as we know it. The problem with record companies, is that they don't understand that they have two businesses, content creation and content distribution.
They have always thought that creation meant distribution and, therefore, by controlling distribution they controlled price (creating scarcity). But the internet has shown that distribution does not need them any more.
If they are to continue to create content. Think about it, the record companies _do_ pay for content to be created, record deals, producing records etc etc. By extension, the film and television companies are in the same boat. If they are to continue to create content then it must be in a more fiscally responsible way. It is not so easy to subsidies "CrapBand01" with the proceeds from U2's latest album. This is a good thing (TM) since it means that I, who does not like "CrapBand01", (nor U2 for that matter) do not have to pay for their shite content to be produced since the content creater will have to act as the agent of the artist to collect on their behalf and the artist will (might ?) receive a fiduciary relationship from the content commissioner to pay them the receipts they have collected on their behalf. Where is the profit??? well the collection of that money and the management services for which the bands are currently charged are _still_ as valuable as they ever were (how valuable is for the fair market to decide) and so are legitimate expenses to be deducted from the receipts.
They would have the ability to keep people within AOl/TW owned websites, further increasing ad-revenue.
Insofar as "ad revenue" exists within the web world. The metrics of the industry suggest that the collapse in funding was not to do with the _fall_ in click through, but the complete non-existence of "page impression/click through" to sales link. That link will not magically appear when the economy picks up.
Probably due to the "policy" constraints of the owners. Not all limitations have to be technical. The Japanese have a _very_ strict attitude towrads military issues.
Nader has highlighted the endemic problem in the US of copanies capitalising on the investments in research funded by tax payers. Further he has identified that corporates capitalise their profits and socialise their losses.
Gates sees no problem with this arrangement (obviously, since it has made him a billionaire) since a solution to this problem , the GPL, is an anathema to him. The government _should_ be looking for was of "infecting" their funding with attributes that mean the ouputs must remain available to the public, since they funded it.
It's a lot easier to bow out of a market when it's a small portion of your total revenue or profit.
But, capital that is invested in a loss making business is not efficiently invested even it is the core business of the company in which that capital is vested. If it is a temporary loss making period then economic theory says shut up shop and minimise losses to non variant costs. If it is long term (ie the "entertainment" businesses for which you example) then take the capital at it's reduced value, because it will never get greater, and invest it elsewhere.
The problem is that the companies who are fighting for their lives a) have an existing artificial pricing regime and so it is a natural extension for them to try and keep it going, and b) the asset value (other than tables and chairs and stuff) of the company is essentially zero which means that the winding up of such a venture would return pennies on the dollar to the capital investors. This is never a popular action and so fighting to the death is worth doing since the alternative for them is so horrible.
For this reason these companies will continue to piss away their investors capital until they expire in a cloud of recrimination and finger pointing.
IBM on the other hand has taken a hit (maybe) on the capital invested in its hard drive business and will (hopefully) put that money elsewhere where it might make some money forthem (and hence their investors). Eranu indeed Mr IBM, you win tonights star prize.
I find all this kind of thing intriguing. The internet is the vehicle of the esoteric. I think that it is very easy to run a powerful argument that the activities performed in a given jurisdiction are subject to the laws of that jurisdiction (most I hope would agree). However what about a communications service provider? If a one of their customers is shown to be doing something illegal within the customers jurisdiction then (given that it is serious enough) I think that one could argue that their connectivity should be removed. But the comms provider has no duty of care as to what packets are sent over its network (or who retrieves those packets). In legal terms, they are too remote, despite their actual proximity. For example the taxi driver that takes an armed robber to the bank. They are not an accomplice, but were they to become aware, they then get a duty of care that affects their continuing supply of the service.
The international nature of the internet is an important factor here, but jurisdiction shopping is an old issue. It is not novel. If you want to set up a site the promotes hostility towards people or things, host it in th US where your free speech is more robustly protected (interesting as to whether it is consitutionally protect given that one might not be a citizen:-) not in Europe (and especially not France or Germany) where the censoring these ideas is much more widely accepted.
All the technical issues about the difficulty of actually detecting such illegality is relevant but only in an executive sense, ie the executive arm of government has to balance the difficulty of enforcement against the cost of over vigorous restraint from the legislative branch.
First, let me disclaim. I agree that the recording industry is broken, further I agree that they are causing an economic externality by their (hopefully eventually futile) attempts to legistlate their profits.
BUT. The examples of other business threatened in the same way that turn to legislation are legion. I have two words for you "import tariffs" and another two words "export subsidies" both these vehicles are state sanctioned means by which industries prevent their inefficiencies from affecting their bottom line. (Steel and lamb any one in the US?:-)
Remember, if you use a bad argument to justify something then you can help strengthen that against which you argue.
this would have been a great april fools joke. Kvim could include an add on module called kflame that automaticaly generates flaming posts. this would force Gvim to release Gflame. these would be followed by Kextinguish and Gwiz. oh please let it end!
I am not sure I agree. Any given piece of hardare (and WiFi is probably a _really_ good example of this) has two parts (1) the core functionality associated with the hardware itself and (2) the associated "computation" to make the hardware work.
For example in the WiFi case, there is the hardware need to trancieive and then all the other stuff needed to make whatever is received into a useful stream of data (maybe even only analog if youhave A/D hardware) or vice verse.
Now within certain limits, the marginal cost of adding CPU processing power is probably less than the cost of adding the first bit of processing power to the hardware solution. Horses for courses if you lke. CPUs are good at being CPUs and WiFi hardware is good at WiFiing. So let the CPU compute and offload the need for the addition of complexity at the hardware level.
I think the use of the CPU in the machine to doo all the CPUing required for the system is an, in principle, good idea in some sense.
Having said all that. Hardware is a good way to do a job that does not change much so maybe all this is kinda irrelevant.
There are a large number of organisations that run their real systems on emulated computers (particularly VAX systems). Some of these companies are part of your earthling "Fortune 500".
I know of at least one organisation that has tried to port their system to a "more modern" environment and failed (twice). As to why they failed, well partly because of economic considerations and partly because of poor design choices. Why was failure possible, well because what they had wasn't all that broken and the "searing" speed of the hardware on which it was being emulated meant that it was still much faster than the orignal system!
Re:Overcomplication
on
Hospital Robots
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Whilst I probably agree with you about "over complicating" the solution to a problem in the hospital case cited, I find the idea of assisting the fraile or disabled tobe a very interesting role. The longer we can keep our aging populations in their existing homes the better we will be (both socially and economically).
My grandparents use(d) home help (provided by the state) to assist them on a daily basis as their eyesight and mobility failed. This probably saved between five and ten years in a special care home, time that was used by someone even more needy.
Many of the tasks performed might well be performed by some of the robots described in the article. The cost compared to home care, both in terms of economics and quality of life, are arguable (for some days the home visitor would be the only person they spoke to) but at least the issue is worth examining carefully.
I have a number of russian colleagues (ex rocket scientists) who wil not use CRT because of the radiation hey emit to the viewer. Weird I reckon, but they will always use LCD for long term viewing. Always.
Then you stick a big metal tube filled up with burning stuff and slap it under the seat for the "batmobilesque" jet of flame shooting out the back. (oh, but don't stop cycling. The flame is very unforgiving)
(We actually did this as kids, jeez it was funny. The kid eventually had to stop and that bike (if it still exists) will still have the slightly singed vinyl seat. Superb)
Er, unless one has a rotary, then cubic inches matters differently. Mazda did some _freaky_ stuff with rotaries in the eighties, the 13b being a thing of beauty (rice burner or not). According to this page: http://www.monito.com/wankel/engines.html They got 500BHp at 8000 (admittedly a race engine) but even so, they factory produced 255BHp at 6500 from some evolutions of the 13b.
Now I ain't 'dissing a big block. Dugga, Dugga, Dugga at the traffic lights is a beautiful thing. But Brrrt, Brrrt, Brrrt is pretty cool as well and from 1300 CCs to boot (Mpg, forget about it:-)
PS Sorry if this seems a bit units of measure challenged, I know metric, but figured imperial would do better for the discussion:-)
"They are getting paid for the original work. The amount they get paid depends on the number of copies sold, because this is what is used to determine the economic value of that work."
NO. And there is the classic conceptual error all the IP apologists use. There is no _property_ in the original work, it cannot be bought or sold. The number of copies sold is irrelevant because they have no economic value. If a work is commissioned, then the original work is paid for. Otherwise the creation of the work is speculation by the artiste, speculation that they can perform it in concert and get paid, or gain such repute from the work's excellence that it will lead to additional commissions or even patronage (grateful dead style) when they ask for funding for their next project from the consumer.
Economic value is created by scarcity or legal fiction, not demand (unless one follows Marx's labour theory of value, but that is a whole other story). In the case of recorded music there is not technical requirement for scarcity and so it is purely the result of legal fiction. There needs to be a good public policy reason for a legal fiction (the licensing of taxicabs is an example of a legal fiction that has an, at least arguable, public policy consideration) the lining of the pockets of "copyright holders" is not one. And I know you will respond with the public policy considerations of "incentive to innovete" etc. But I (and many others) would argue that these incentives exist regardless. And even if one was not willing to concede that issue, property is _just_ one way of doing in a state sponsored way. State funded grants, would work equally well (and probably more fairly) since noone would become a super rich of such a program and so the net social utility would be higher. But the problem I have is that the IP apologist _presupposes_ that it (intellectual property) exists, that it is some kind of natural right. Well it ain't so think outside the paradigm in which you live and a world without IP might even look like a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Cut off the spines (a hacksaw works well) and drop them in a page feed scanner.
Interestinglr enough this process works. A few years ago now, when I was in university, a friend of mone was looking for a large repository of english prose from which to draw conclusions about his hypothesis regarding aspects of natural language processing.
Anyway, there was a certain dictionary company that was willing to provide their five million word dictionary for some exorbitant cost. When I discovered that another friend of mine working at the dictionary published by my university had a twenty million word database of actual prose that he collected by "cutting the spiones of books and dropping them in a page feed scanner". Whilst omnipage was abou the only decent OCR at the time the field now is probably more extensive.
My friend got to use the 20 million word dictionary for nada, as long as he helped the dictionary guys out with a bit of coding from time to time. Nice huh. Sharing is such a beautiful thing.
I recall reading that something like 87% of our information comes from the visual channel. If we assume that _all_ of the rest comes aurally then one would at least expect visual means of human input to be 6 - 7 times more effective. And that is without considering the implications of the amount of data that can be presented visually. The old addage "A picture is worth a thousand words" rings true here.
A friend of mine got into authoring (of presentations, you know, kiosk displays, videos etc) back in the early nineties and what was interesting to me was that one could provide a representation of the audio track in a visual sense that made editing and splicing really quite convenient, the classic waveform graph. But no such mechanism was around for the video track.
The reason that this worked was that the static representation of the audio could be present so easily within one instant of 2d pictorial bandwidth, ie the picture of the waveform was enough to show what you needed to know about it. This low bandwidth characteristic is the problem with audio as a human input in that it decays too quickly. If the computer tells you fact X, if you want to recheck it, or ensure that it was suffciently differnt to fact Y you have to have the computer keep repeating them both.
It is the combination of persistence and bandwidth that means that visual input to humans will always win. I suspect that even if we are able to interface directly with the brain we will have to control such interfaces via metaphor that the brain can handle and the visual is the highest bandwidth we have at our disposal.
As for output from humans, verbal is excellent for exactly the same reasons that it is bad as input. It acts at a distance, and it decays, the instruction once verbalised will be gone once the sound energy dissapates. The idea that oral instruction of machines should be via use of explicit instructions such as "italicise this" or "scroll down" is naive. The richness of verbal communication, even without analysis of tone or subtext, is such that the real benefit is in conveying from human to machine, commonly understood processes "Begin dictation, blah blah blah, [emphasis|indent|strike|... that last [word|sentence|...]" and the like.
the problem is that the globalisation did not go far enough. Bretton woods was designed to create an environment where the natural efficiencies of different regions should prosper. But unfortunately many governements lacked the courage to acknowledge (perhaps for good reason perhaps not) that, for example, not every country needed a car industry or that grain producers in Europe should be able to compete with farms the size of switzerland in Australia. So barriers to trade were created and capital did not flow to the third world to precisey exploit the beefits that their cheaper labour bring. Expanding yhe use of cheap labour in the thord world is the most efficient way of raising the costs of that labour to the extent that it is comparable with local insudtry. The fact that tariffs still exist impede this natural flow and create the inefficiencies that lead to the continuing mis match of labour price.
But bear in mind, if you read the entire thing, it doesn't talk about putting Linux on every public sector PC.
On the contrary, what this episode about is sooo much more important than linux on the desktop. That _even_ if MS still sell product to public institutions in Peru, they must do so in a way that is so libre that it does my heart good.
I ranted at some friends today about howt the RIAA and MPAA are screwing us all daily and the software industry is the same. I have oft wondered where are the great legal philosophers of this age, the Hobbes, Locke or Bentham of the information revolution. This man might be one such and to be reminded of his position is a good thing (thanks for the repost). I hope that such elegance is as infectious as the ideas of property were to the industrial revolution that time.
I now know what I must do
I was always disappointed with Matrix one in one respect (I enjoyed the film overall however, perhaps because of all the Sydney locations, that was a nice care package for an ex pat :-) I would have preferred if Neo had discovered his latent powers more "accidently".
For example in the initial "jump" scene, that noone ever makes first time, if he had made it by almost making it naturally and then "bending" the building by accident. You know doing extraordinry things but subconsciously. It would have carried quite a nice twist. It would aslo have allowed them to conclude the film without granting Neo control over his powers, making the subsequent franchise more interesting.
One of the problems of winged vehicles is the effect of catestrophic propulsion failure. In a train or a truck if your engine fails you stop moving but the cargo is still in tact. In a winged vehicle a power failure will result in a loss of cargo, if not at the bottom of the ocean then almost certainly all over the surface of it.
Whilst the same is true for passenger flights, to some extent the econmics of cargo (particulalry if one increases the size of a WIG vehicle to make it cargo viable) mean that suxh failures (or the risk thereof) make it impossible to use as a platform.
In general, I pretty much agree with you. I would go further, IP is bunk, but regardless regioning in the media industry (DVDs) should be a crime. And yet I still buy DVDs, because I am weak and I love film. But no more. I will vote against these moguls with my dollars. I do not care about the "oh but they will a) not care b) use it as evidence of piracy". Enough is enough. Live by conscience and demonstrate by example.
I used to think that the 2nd amendment was to stop the federal government from impinging on the states creating militia, and that that _must_ have been the intention of the "fouding fathers" (I am not an American BTW). But I found some writings from Madison and Jefferson, which state unequivicolly that citizens with guns is the best way to keep the government in check. That's a pretty clear statement of intention.
..." clause. What the states do is well beyond the control of the constitution. This is where most of the gun control comes. Sorry.
It is clear that the constitutional provision is designed to stop the government from diarming the populace. Now, do not misunderstand, I do not believe that an armed poulace is a good thing, but one cannot legitimately read the US constitution other than to allow gun ownership.
As an aside, the other problem that "gun liberationist" will have is that the ammendment is effectively prefaced with the "congress shall pass no law that
You raise some interesting points, with most of which I disagree, but when you say, in response to your point (2)
Ownership might complicate things a little at Blockbuster: A return would have to be architected as a repurchase of the IP instead of merely returning a rental.
you are creating a rod for your own back. Rental is fine under your regime. Rental (leasing etc) exists in the "real", private propoerty world already, under your regime, Blockbuster would have the same facility. (This point is at the root of why I disagree with your regime)
It is the end of "distribution" as we know it. The problem with record companies, is that they don't understand that they have two businesses, content creation and content distribution.
They have always thought that creation meant distribution and, therefore, by controlling distribution they controlled price (creating scarcity). But the internet has shown that distribution does not need them any more.
If they are to continue to create content. Think about it, the record companies _do_ pay for content to be created, record deals, producing records etc etc. By extension, the film and television companies are in the same boat. If they are to continue to create content then it must be in a more fiscally responsible way. It is not so easy to subsidies "CrapBand01" with the proceeds from U2's latest album. This is a good thing (TM) since it means that I, who does not like "CrapBand01", (nor U2 for that matter) do not have to pay for their shite content to be produced since the content creater will have to act as the agent of the artist to collect on their behalf and the artist will (might ?) receive a fiduciary relationship from the content commissioner to pay them the receipts they have collected on their behalf. Where is the profit??? well the collection of that money and the management services for which the bands are currently charged are _still_ as valuable as they ever were (how valuable is for the fair market to decide) and so are legitimate expenses to be deducted from the receipts.
Insofar as "ad revenue" exists within the web world. The metrics of the industry suggest that the collapse in funding was not to do with the _fall_ in click through, but the complete non-existence of "page impression/click through" to sales link. That link will not magically appear when the economy picks up.
Probably due to the "policy" constraints of the owners. Not all limitations have to be technical. The Japanese have a _very_ strict attitude towrads military issues.
Nader has highlighted the endemic problem in the US of copanies capitalising on the investments in research funded by tax payers. Further he has identified that corporates capitalise their profits and socialise their losses.
Gates sees no problem with this arrangement (obviously, since it has made him a billionaire) since a solution to this problem , the GPL, is an anathema to him. The government _should_ be looking for was of "infecting" their funding with attributes that mean the ouputs must remain available to the public, since they funded it.
The worm is turning.
It's a lot easier to bow out of a market when it's a small portion of your total revenue or profit.
But, capital that is invested in a loss making business is not efficiently invested even it is the core business of the company in which that capital is vested. If it is a temporary loss making period then economic theory says shut up shop and minimise losses to non variant costs. If it is long term (ie the "entertainment" businesses for which you example) then take the capital at it's reduced value, because it will never get greater, and invest it elsewhere.
The problem is that the companies who are fighting for their lives a) have an existing artificial pricing regime and so it is a natural extension for them to try and keep it going, and b) the asset value (other than tables and chairs and stuff) of the company is essentially zero which means that the winding up of such a venture would return pennies on the dollar to the capital investors. This is never a popular action and so fighting to the death is worth doing since the alternative for them is so horrible.
For this reason these companies will continue to piss away their investors capital until they expire in a cloud of recrimination and finger pointing.
IBM on the other hand has taken a hit (maybe) on the capital invested in its hard drive business and will (hopefully) put that money elsewhere where it might make some money forthem (and hence their investors). Eranu indeed Mr IBM, you win tonights star prize.
I find all this kind of thing intriguing. The internet is the vehicle of the esoteric. I think that it is very easy to run a powerful argument that the activities performed in a given jurisdiction are subject to the laws of that jurisdiction (most I hope would agree). However what about a communications service provider? If a one of their customers is shown to be doing something illegal within the customers jurisdiction then (given that it is serious enough) I think that one could argue that their connectivity should be removed. But the comms provider has no duty of care as to what packets are sent over its network (or who retrieves those packets). In legal terms, they are too remote, despite their actual proximity. For example the taxi driver that takes an armed robber to the bank. They are not an accomplice, but were they to become aware, they then get a duty of care that affects their continuing supply of the service.
:-) not in Europe (and especially not France or Germany) where the censoring these ideas is much more widely accepted.
The international nature of the internet is an important factor here, but jurisdiction shopping is an old issue. It is not novel. If you want to set up a site the promotes hostility towards people or things, host it in th US where your free speech is more robustly protected (interesting as to whether it is consitutionally protect given that one might not be a citizen
All the technical issues about the difficulty of actually detecting such illegality is relevant but only in an executive sense, ie the executive arm of government has to balance the difficulty of enforcement against the cost of over vigorous restraint from the legislative branch.
First, let me disclaim. I agree that the recording industry is broken, further I agree that they are causing an economic externality by their (hopefully eventually futile) attempts to legistlate their profits.
:-)
BUT. The examples of other business threatened in the same way that turn to legislation are legion. I have two words for you "import tariffs" and another two words "export subsidies" both these vehicles are state sanctioned means by which industries prevent their inefficiencies from affecting their bottom line. (Steel and lamb any one in the US?
Remember, if you use a bad argument to justify something then you can help strengthen that against which you argue.
Why dont the vim developers work on makeing a vim with an IDE rather than having other work on embeding vim in other apps
Magnificent troll
this would have been a great april fools joke. Kvim could include an add on module called kflame that automaticaly generates flaming posts. this would force Gvim to release Gflame. these would be followed by Kextinguish and Gwiz. oh please let it end!
Sounds like Blazeware(TM) to me.
I am not sure I agree. Any given piece of hardare (and WiFi is probably a _really_ good example of this) has two parts (1) the core functionality associated with the hardware itself and (2) the associated "computation" to make the hardware work.
For example in the WiFi case, there is the hardware need to trancieive and then all the other stuff needed to make whatever is received into a useful stream of data (maybe even only analog if youhave A/D hardware) or vice verse.
Now within certain limits, the marginal cost of adding CPU processing power is probably less than the cost of adding the first bit of processing power to the hardware solution. Horses for courses if you lke. CPUs are good at being CPUs and WiFi hardware is good at WiFiing. So let the CPU compute and offload the need for the addition of complexity at the hardware level.
I think the use of the CPU in the machine to doo all the CPUing required for the system is an, in principle, good idea in some sense.
Having said all that. Hardware is a good way to do a job that does not change much so maybe all this is kinda irrelevant.
There are a large number of organisations that run their real systems on emulated computers (particularly VAX systems). Some of these companies are part of your earthling "Fortune 500".
I know of at least one organisation that has tried to port their system to a "more modern" environment and failed (twice). As to why they failed, well partly because of economic considerations and partly because of poor design choices. Why was failure possible, well because what they had wasn't all that broken and the "searing" speed of the hardware on which it was being emulated meant that it was still much faster than the orignal system!
Whilst I probably agree with you about "over complicating" the solution to a problem in the hospital case cited, I find the idea of assisting the fraile or disabled tobe a very interesting role. The longer we can keep our aging populations in their existing homes the better we will be (both socially and economically).
My grandparents use(d) home help (provided by the state) to assist them on a daily basis as their eyesight and mobility failed. This probably saved between five and ten years in a special care home, time that was used by someone even more needy.
Many of the tasks performed might well be performed by some of the robots described in the article. The cost compared to home care, both in terms of economics and quality of life, are arguable (for some days the home visitor would be the only person they spoke to) but at least the issue is worth examining carefully.
I have a number of russian colleagues (ex rocket scientists) who wil not use CRT because of the radiation hey emit to the viewer. Weird I reckon, but they will always use LCD for long term viewing. Always.
Then you stick a big metal tube filled up with burning stuff and slap it under the seat for the "batmobilesque" jet of flame shooting out the back. (oh, but don't stop cycling. The flame is very unforgiving)
(We actually did this as kids, jeez it was funny. The kid eventually had to stop and that bike (if it still exists) will still have the slightly singed vinyl seat. Superb)
Er, unless one has a rotary, then cubic inches matters differently. Mazda did some _freaky_ stuff with rotaries in the eighties, the 13b being a thing of beauty (rice burner or not). According to this page:
They got 500BHp at 8000 (admittedly a race engine) but even so, they factory produced 255BHp at 6500 from some evolutions of the 13b.
:-)
:-)
http://www.monito.com/wankel/engines.html
Now I ain't 'dissing a big block. Dugga, Dugga, Dugga at the traffic lights is a beautiful thing. But Brrrt, Brrrt, Brrrt is pretty cool as well and from 1300 CCs to boot (Mpg, forget about it
PS Sorry if this seems a bit units of measure challenged, I know metric, but figured imperial would do better for the discussion
"They are getting paid for the original work. The amount they get paid depends on the number of copies sold, because this is what is used to determine the economic value of that work."
NO. And there is the classic conceptual error all the IP apologists use. There is no _property_ in the original work, it cannot be bought or sold. The number of copies sold is irrelevant because they have no economic value. If a work is commissioned, then the original work is paid for. Otherwise the creation of the work is speculation by the artiste, speculation that they can perform it in concert and get paid, or gain such repute from the work's excellence that it will lead to additional commissions or even patronage (grateful dead style) when they ask for funding for their next project from the consumer.
Economic value is created by scarcity or legal fiction, not demand (unless one follows Marx's labour theory of value, but that is a whole other story). In the case of recorded music there is not technical requirement for scarcity and so it is purely the result of legal fiction. There needs to be a good public policy reason for a legal fiction (the licensing of taxicabs is an example of a legal fiction that has an, at least arguable, public policy consideration) the lining of the pockets of "copyright holders" is not one. And I know you will respond with the public policy considerations of "incentive to innovete" etc. But I (and many others) would argue that these incentives exist regardless. And even if one was not willing to concede that issue, property is _just_ one way of doing in a state sponsored way. State funded grants, would work equally well (and probably more fairly) since noone would become a super rich of such a program and so the net social utility would be higher. But the problem I have is that the IP apologist _presupposes_ that it (intellectual property) exists, that it is some kind of natural right. Well it ain't so think outside the paradigm in which you live and a world without IP might even look like a good thing.