The obvious other choice Google has is to NOT provide such service. That should be a realistic alternative.
Or will really everyone suddenly buy an iPhone at twice the price of an Android phone just to watch movies? So not having a movie market, would that really dent their competitiveness? That market is probably US-only anyway.
Or will Android users simply resort to piracy to get their movies on their phones instead? In which case the movie companies lose out more than when there would be an unrestricted streaming option.
This all keeping in mind that DRM in music is all but dead already (all it really did was give iTunes absolute power over the record companies). Makes me wonder more and more why they keep trying with movies, books, games...
The same person always signs coins with the same signature - one way or another signatures are verifiable after all. Doesn't that mean that if several people receive coins form a single sender, they can be tracked back to the same sender. Now linking that sender to a person may not be trivial but you have several leads which in effect shouldmake that easier.
That necessarily means these third parties are being told (and record) who transfers a coin to who. Breaking the untraceability/anonymity that this system is said to have.
How are those miners other than a central bank based system, other than that you now have lots of central banks, instead of one? And what if a miner simply stops doing this, or is simply offline for a while, does that block transactions with these miner's coins?
Bitcoin is supposed to be anonymous, and that transactions can not be traced back to a single user. So there all the remedies proposed by you break down. And it's also exactly why I don't understand how re-spending can be prevented.
No matter whether you use some transfer protocol or whatever: the coin is on your system, can be back-upped, and thus can be recovered. So create back-up, do transaction that spends coin, restore back-up, spend same coin again. As the back-up is restored the record of the original transaction has been lost.
It should also work like that by copying the bitcoin wallet to another system. Spend same coin from different IP, trace back to unique origin? How?
The issue bitcoin tries to solve is something that I think is unsolvable. Because money that exists in electronic form is easily copyable, while traditional money is not easily copyable (reproducible may be a better word here).
When it comes to investigations the courts may or may not accept that an IP points to a unique individual, it generally tends to point to no more than a very small group of people (typically a single household), and thus can still be a very useful clue for discovering further evidence.
You forgot the point about verification where you may verify where a coin has been, but not that it has not been "forked" somewhere down the line. I still really don't see how a coin could not be transferred twice. Have a coin, give it to Alice and sign it with Alice's key, now Alice has a very valid coin. Keep the original file of the coin, sign it with Bob's public key, and now Bob also has the same coin. Unless Alice and Bob start talking to each other comparing coins, how could they ever find out that they, in fact, have been given the same coin?
Not that I really understand the whole BitCoin idea - I understand your comment even less. There's a public key that you keep private? Euhm... how is that key public then? And apparently there is something in the chain that requires you to keep your public key: why? To trace things back to you? The idea is that it's NOT traceable. And why store this single-use key to begin with, after it has been used?
Best guess: the cooling water system is a bunch of separate pipes and ducts, so the cooling water does not come in direct contact with the fuel rods, but cools via heat exchangers (fully separate systems - water in contact with fuel rods WILL become contaminated, also in normal operation). And as such most of this cooling water does not pick up any radiation, but is simply pumped in on one side and comes out on the other side with just a slightly higher temperature.
I would imagine that when it has a melt-down it means material becomes liquid and like an ice cream in hot weather the molten top starts running down and contaminates/damages the submerged parts of the rods.
Which may turn out very well for the fish. Depending how much, if at all, they are affected by the radiation. Levels are after all low, and the lifespan of a fish is short. Our long lives make us extra susceptible to long term effects of low levels of radiation.
In effect a large area of the sea can not be fished: this creates an effective fish reserve, where stocks can recover without the immense pressure of modern-day fishing. We're busy emptying our oceans; I heard as much as 90% of fish stocks have collapsed already (collapsed meaning less than 10% of original catches). Fish that are caught are smaller and smaller as they do not have the time to mature.
Reserving a large area of our seas for fish to live undisturbed may be a very good thing, as it makes sure the fish living there can mature and stocks can recover - and as a result also improving stocks in non-protected areas as fish don't stay at one place. This sounds to me very much like a potential blessing in disguise.
The number of people killed by the Chernobyl accident is subject to debate, depending on who you may believe and how you count (which deaths you relate to the specific accident and it's aftermath) tens of thousands were killed.
Anyway two big issues with nuclear:
Storage of waste. This is simply an unresolved issue. Short-term (decades) may be solved; but the real long-term storage which is virtually "forever" not.
Power is not exactly on demand: you can not switch on and off a nuke like you do a coal fired plant. Nukes are great for baseline production, not for the morning peak demand. That requires other solutions, and storage of energy for quick release is still a big issue. Batteries have too little capacity. Flywheels same. We have no proper solution for that yet.
Makes me recall a conversation during excursion to a nuclear plant with my student's association.
"How about earthquakes?" "Well besides that this part of the world doesn't have them; we're built to withstand a magnitude 7-8 or so quake" (exact number I don't know - but a magn. 4 quake is already very very rare in The Netherlands).
"Or an airplane crashing on the reactor?" "It's built to withstand that."
"How about an airplane crashing on the control room?" "Then this control room would be broken but we have a second one."
"How about a nuclear bomb falling on the reactor?" "Well that we can not withstand... but that doesn't matter too much in such a scenario, does it?"
That was almost 20 years ago, about a nuclear power plant by then about 30 years old.
I don't need an alarm clock. I have a little child. Much more reliable - also it doesn't have an off button so hard to turn around and continue sleeping. Very effective.
A proper recording does have cost. Serious cost. Professional studios still don't come cheap - and if you want to have a proper sounding demo, you have to use one of those, not a tape recorder with a microphone attached to it. But then of course a good studio will do a lot more for your song than just recording the sound waves.
Even so, by negotiating specific fees with certain labels only, all other labels (mostly independent) were left in the cold. Sounds like the book deal they tried to impose on everyone (which iirc in the end didn't fly).
The difference I can see is that you could set up an account on Google, put your music there, and share your login credentials for that account with the world, effectively easily sharing the music.
The risk for music labels of letting Google get away with it unchallenged is that other companies try to do the same.
Now the music labels could start suing start-ups that are trying to provide such services, with the risk that those companies get support from Google (that would be Google protecting their own interests by preventing unfavourable precedent to be set), and they indirectly still fight Google.
So no matter what, the music labels are having a big problem. Especially as personally I believe that such use should be allowed, as the users can not share their music, and it's basically a copy for personal use.
Not 90% of total computer users - 90% of potential customers, i.e. people that are interested in buying music on-line and have the means to do it (own a credit card, have enough money, and live in a place where such services are available).
And for that part I think OP may not be far off the mark. I haven't heard recently of spectacular growth stories for iTMS like you heard the first few years, for example. There is probably a need for something radically different for the on-line music market to really take off - reasonable pricing comes to mind.
Of course, anywhere Apple or Google goes, Microsoft has to follow. Poorly.
Agreed.
Many of the most brilliant minds in the industry work at Microsoft.
That definitely used to be the case, maybe 10 years ago, is it still? MS lost a lot of their attraction since then. No matter what they have 89,000 employees, those people must have a lot of talent in between them.
Too bad the upper management has a bad case of Apple/Google Envy and spends all their time chasing the latest shiny object instead of defining the future of computing.
Apple is doing the same. They are not the first to come with a digital music player, with a tablet, definitely not with a smart phone. Apple looks at the market, sees what products have potential or are doing well, pick them up, copy the good bits, discard the bad, add more good bits, polish the whole thing, and release it. It doesn't always work - but they have plenty of successes. iPod, iPhone, iPad, iTMS, OS-X are some of the most recent success stories.
Google is doing it too: they started off with search (nothing new even when they started), and came up with a new way to do it. They didn't invent search engines - they just took the concept and improved on it. They later probably had a good look at Hotmail, Yahoo mail, and all the other free e-mail providers that were very popular back then, and thought "we can do that - better". And so gmail was born. The browser wars got hot with Firefox and Safari going head-on with IE, and Google decided to jump in the game as well.
Why Microsoft can't do this anymore is beyond me. They played the game quite well: looked at WordPerfect, built Word, and (partly thanks to failing by WP with their terrible v6 release) Word took over. It was simply the better word processor. Same for IE vs Netscape. They looked at dominant Netscape, took the good, improved on it, and off they went. Exchange is still a major e-mail/calendar/etc. solution for medium to large businesses - is there any real competitor already?
A priest or doctor giving testimony on a client is liable to prosecution - the have an obligation of secrecy. Such testimony (if given) will also not be allowed as proof for any wrongdoing. E-mail providers are in a totally different class - they are not allowed to keep things secret when formally asked for information.
Poor analogy as in most jurisdictions a doctor is not allowed to disclose any patient information, and the judicial system can not even demand such disclosure. Same by the way accounts for priests.
Many people for some reason think it's safe because the site says they will protect your data.
Well maybe they can protect your data and will do some effort for it, the fact is you're putting your data on someone else's computer. The owner of that system (basically anyone with high enough privileges or physical access to the system) can access your data. They not necessarily will, but they can. And that little factoid is enough to make it insecure.
That such file hosting sites may have additional security holes allowing access to data one shouldn't have access too, is not important any more. When it's out of your controlled environment, the data is out of your control.
The only way to use remote hosting securely is to either own and directly control the remote hosting site by yourself, or to encrypt everything before it leaves your controlled environment, and keep the secret key to yourself. It's as simple as that. I'm wondering why this is even considered news here.
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The obvious other choice Google has is to NOT provide such service. That should be a realistic alternative.
Or will really everyone suddenly buy an iPhone at twice the price of an Android phone just to watch movies? So not having a movie market, would that really dent their competitiveness? That market is probably US-only anyway.
Or will Android users simply resort to piracy to get their movies on their phones instead? In which case the movie companies lose out more than when there would be an unrestricted streaming option.
This all keeping in mind that DRM in music is all but dead already (all it really did was give iTunes absolute power over the record companies). Makes me wonder more and more why they keep trying with movies, books, games...
The same person always signs coins with the same signature - one way or another signatures are verifiable after all. Doesn't that mean that if several people receive coins form a single sender, they can be tracked back to the same sender. Now linking that sender to a person may not be trivial but you have several leads which in effect shouldmake that easier.
So these miners store transactions.
That necessarily means these third parties are being told (and record) who transfers a coin to who. Breaking the untraceability/anonymity that this system is said to have.
How are those miners other than a central bank based system, other than that you now have lots of central banks, instead of one? And what if a miner simply stops doing this, or is simply offline for a while, does that block transactions with these miner's coins?
Bitcoin is supposed to be anonymous, and that transactions can not be traced back to a single user. So there all the remedies proposed by you break down. And it's also exactly why I don't understand how re-spending can be prevented.
No matter whether you use some transfer protocol or whatever: the coin is on your system, can be back-upped, and thus can be recovered. So create back-up, do transaction that spends coin, restore back-up, spend same coin again. As the back-up is restored the record of the original transaction has been lost.
It should also work like that by copying the bitcoin wallet to another system. Spend same coin from different IP, trace back to unique origin? How?
The issue bitcoin tries to solve is something that I think is unsolvable. Because money that exists in electronic form is easily copyable, while traditional money is not easily copyable (reproducible may be a better word here).
When it comes to investigations the courts may or may not accept that an IP points to a unique individual, it generally tends to point to no more than a very small group of people (typically a single household), and thus can still be a very useful clue for discovering further evidence.
You forgot the point about verification where you may verify where a coin has been, but not that it has not been "forked" somewhere down the line. I still really don't see how a coin could not be transferred twice. Have a coin, give it to Alice and sign it with Alice's key, now Alice has a very valid coin. Keep the original file of the coin, sign it with Bob's public key, and now Bob also has the same coin. Unless Alice and Bob start talking to each other comparing coins, how could they ever find out that they, in fact, have been given the same coin?
Not that I really understand the whole BitCoin idea - I understand your comment even less. There's a public key that you keep private? Euhm... how is that key public then? And apparently there is something in the chain that requires you to keep your public key: why? To trace things back to you? The idea is that it's NOT traceable. And why store this single-use key to begin with, after it has been used?
This was about a question asked by a Dutch customs official when arriving in The Netherlands.
Common sense dictates that this person would be asking the question in Dutch, not German. And apparently repeated in English afterwards.
Best guess: the cooling water system is a bunch of separate pipes and ducts, so the cooling water does not come in direct contact with the fuel rods, but cools via heat exchangers (fully separate systems - water in contact with fuel rods WILL become contaminated, also in normal operation). And as such most of this cooling water does not pick up any radiation, but is simply pumped in on one side and comes out on the other side with just a slightly higher temperature.
I would imagine that when it has a melt-down it means material becomes liquid and like an ice cream in hot weather the molten top starts running down and contaminates/damages the submerged parts of the rods.
Which may turn out very well for the fish. Depending how much, if at all, they are affected by the radiation. Levels are after all low, and the lifespan of a fish is short. Our long lives make us extra susceptible to long term effects of low levels of radiation.
In effect a large area of the sea can not be fished: this creates an effective fish reserve, where stocks can recover without the immense pressure of modern-day fishing. We're busy emptying our oceans; I heard as much as 90% of fish stocks have collapsed already (collapsed meaning less than 10% of original catches). Fish that are caught are smaller and smaller as they do not have the time to mature.
Reserving a large area of our seas for fish to live undisturbed may be a very good thing, as it makes sure the fish living there can mature and stocks can recover - and as a result also improving stocks in non-protected areas as fish don't stay at one place. This sounds to me very much like a potential blessing in disguise.
The number of people killed by the Chernobyl accident is subject to debate, depending on who you may believe and how you count (which deaths you relate to the specific accident and it's aftermath) tens of thousands were killed.
Anyway two big issues with nuclear:
Storage of waste. This is simply an unresolved issue. Short-term (decades) may be solved; but the real long-term storage which is virtually "forever" not.
Power is not exactly on demand: you can not switch on and off a nuke like you do a coal fired plant. Nukes are great for baseline production, not for the morning peak demand. That requires other solutions, and storage of energy for quick release is still a big issue. Batteries have too little capacity. Flywheels same. We have no proper solution for that yet.
Makes me recall a conversation during excursion to a nuclear plant with my student's association.
"How about earthquakes?" "Well besides that this part of the world doesn't have them; we're built to withstand a magnitude 7-8 or so quake" (exact number I don't know - but a magn. 4 quake is already very very rare in The Netherlands).
"Or an airplane crashing on the reactor?" "It's built to withstand that."
"How about an airplane crashing on the control room?" "Then this control room would be broken but we have a second one."
"How about a nuclear bomb falling on the reactor?" "Well that we can not withstand... but that doesn't matter too much in such a scenario, does it?"
That was almost 20 years ago, about a nuclear power plant by then about 30 years old.
I don't need an alarm clock. I have a little child. Much more reliable - also it doesn't have an off button so hard to turn around and continue sleeping. Very effective.
It must be really dark in your home.
At least Windows users can see the light of day!
A proper recording does have cost. Serious cost. Professional studios still don't come cheap - and if you want to have a proper sounding demo, you have to use one of those, not a tape recorder with a microphone attached to it. But then of course a good studio will do a lot more for your song than just recording the sound waves.
Even so, by negotiating specific fees with certain labels only, all other labels (mostly independent) were left in the cold. Sounds like the book deal they tried to impose on everyone (which iirc in the end didn't fly).
The difference I can see is that you could set up an account on Google, put your music there, and share your login credentials for that account with the world, effectively easily sharing the music.
The risk for music labels of letting Google get away with it unchallenged is that other companies try to do the same.
Now the music labels could start suing start-ups that are trying to provide such services, with the risk that those companies get support from Google (that would be Google protecting their own interests by preventing unfavourable precedent to be set), and they indirectly still fight Google.
So no matter what, the music labels are having a big problem. Especially as personally I believe that such use should be allowed, as the users can not share their music, and it's basically a copy for personal use.
Not 90% of total computer users - 90% of potential customers, i.e. people that are interested in buying music on-line and have the means to do it (own a credit card, have enough money, and live in a place where such services are available).
And for that part I think OP may not be far off the mark. I haven't heard recently of spectacular growth stories for iTMS like you heard the first few years, for example. There is probably a need for something radically different for the on-line music market to really take off - reasonable pricing comes to mind.
Of course, anywhere Apple or Google goes, Microsoft has to follow. Poorly.
Agreed.
Many of the most brilliant minds in the industry work at Microsoft.
That definitely used to be the case, maybe 10 years ago, is it still? MS lost a lot of their attraction since then. No matter what they have 89,000 employees, those people must have a lot of talent in between them.
Too bad the upper management has a bad case of Apple/Google Envy and spends all their time chasing the latest shiny object instead of defining the future of computing.
Apple is doing the same. They are not the first to come with a digital music player, with a tablet, definitely not with a smart phone. Apple looks at the market, sees what products have potential or are doing well, pick them up, copy the good bits, discard the bad, add more good bits, polish the whole thing, and release it. It doesn't always work - but they have plenty of successes. iPod, iPhone, iPad, iTMS, OS-X are some of the most recent success stories.
Google is doing it too: they started off with search (nothing new even when they started), and came up with a new way to do it. They didn't invent search engines - they just took the concept and improved on it. They later probably had a good look at Hotmail, Yahoo mail, and all the other free e-mail providers that were very popular back then, and thought "we can do that - better". And so gmail was born. The browser wars got hot with Firefox and Safari going head-on with IE, and Google decided to jump in the game as well.
Why Microsoft can't do this anymore is beyond me. They played the game quite well: looked at WordPerfect, built Word, and (partly thanks to failing by WP with their terrible v6 release) Word took over. It was simply the better word processor. Same for IE vs Netscape. They looked at dominant Netscape, took the good, improved on it, and off they went. Exchange is still a major e-mail/calendar/etc. solution for medium to large businesses - is there any real competitor already?
A priest or doctor giving testimony on a client is liable to prosecution - the have an obligation of secrecy. Such testimony (if given) will also not be allowed as proof for any wrongdoing. E-mail providers are in a totally different class - they are not allowed to keep things secret when formally asked for information.
Poor analogy as in most jurisdictions a doctor is not allowed to disclose any patient information, and the judicial system can not even demand such disclosure. Same by the way accounts for priests.
It is on a remote site, out of your control, so it's not secure. End of story.
Encrypt before it leaves your system if you want to keep it secure. Or only store data on such sites that you really don't care if it becomes public.
And even if there really are no remote security holes, anyone with admin/root access to the servers can access your data. Without you knowing.
Many people for some reason think it's safe because the site says they will protect your data.
Well maybe they can protect your data and will do some effort for it, the fact is you're putting your data on someone else's computer. The owner of that system (basically anyone with high enough privileges or physical access to the system) can access your data. They not necessarily will, but they can. And that little factoid is enough to make it insecure.
That such file hosting sites may have additional security holes allowing access to data one shouldn't have access too, is not important any more. When it's out of your controlled environment, the data is out of your control.
The only way to use remote hosting securely is to either own and directly control the remote hosting site by yourself, or to encrypt everything before it leaves your controlled environment, and keep the secret key to yourself. It's as simple as that. I'm wondering why this is even considered news here.