It's really not that hard - stick it in the intergalacic medium where the hydrogen density is low, and accelerate slowly for a few thousand years. You'll get there eventually.
Accelerating to that speed is not hard. Surviving it is hard.
It's bad in China. They like to pass the prints from the "premium" contractor in Taiwan, to somebody cheap on-shore that will knock them off to Southeast Asia markets. Probably half the stuff on the streets of Hong Kong or Seoul is counterfeit made from the actual prints, but at unauthorized manufactures.
And the vast majority of it is every bit as good as the original, because it's made in the same plants by the same people who do all the other outsourced manufacturing. There is never any particular evidence presented to support the usual claim that the "unauthorized" product has a higher defect rate than the "authorized" product.
This is about whether or not some large US corporation gets their cut of the profits. Nothing more. It should be no surprise that they behave the same way as the mafia.
For which you need people capable of doing that, who have to be paid. That might not cost as much as developing a new circuit from scratch altogether, but it _might_ be enough to make the pirating just not worth it.
Unlikely. The need to employ actual mechanics has never been a problem for people running chop shops.
Removing a generic feature from a chip design just isn't that hard. If you make it hard to remove, it won't be generic any more, and it will significantly add to the cost of developing each chip (already huge) - so nobody is going to do that.
The main reason for the absurdly high pay is that the people aren't considered replaceable. Software engineers can be replaced with some random undergrad incompetent (or at least the managers think they can be), so they're paid squat. You can't replace an actor in the middle of a series or movie (usually), so the actor gets to make up any number they like.
When computer synthesis gets good enough to slap any face and voice onto any actor (and we're ten years away from that now, at most - researchers already have crude working models of the technology, it just needs refining), there is going to be a lot of crying.
I'm not trying to be a dooms-day preacher, saying that we're going to start killing our own citizens for exercising their freedom of speech
That's an unlikely scenario anyway. Given the typical behaviour of the US, you're far more likely to start killing your own citizens because it's cheaper than figuring out whether they've done anything. That's more or less what's happening in Gitmo to non-citizens already; it is a small step to start doing it to your own citizens as well (while claiming that "of course" they're all really guilty and the handful of innocents reported by the minor media are just exceptional cases where you "don't have all the facts" - but you can't know the facts for national security reasons, just accept that it's better these people are dead).
The reason for posting the above link it not to boast, as the code and the concept are very trivial, it is there just to show that I'm not against Open Source or Free Software, but just to make a point that Free as in beer is free for you but not for the one who serves it to you.
That's not true. Very frequently, the scenario operates like this:
Person A has a need for a piece of software to do X.
Person A creates a piece of software to do X.
Person A is now in possession of a piece of software to do X, and has gained from it - he is "paid" by having something to do X, which he did not have before. He created it purely because he needed it. But he's still got that software. He doesn't need to bury it in a hole. So he releases it for other people to use, and in no way does this cost him anything.
Person B has a need for a piece of software to do X and Y. He takes person A's software, and extends it to do Y as well.
The cycle continues. Each person involved benefits from the existence of the software that they need, which would not otherwise exist. Since they all would have had to create the software anyway (since they needed it and it didn't exist), it costs them nothing to let other people use it. And all of them are better off because they have shared the work, rather than each one duplicating it themselves: giving it away has actually gained them something, it hasn't cost them something.
Behind most successful free software projects is a cycle of individual need and gain like this one.
So instead of fixing the problem, we should all throw out the baby with the bathwater, eliminating patents all together, and condemning the many companies who have legitimate reasons and needs for patents.
The baby is a baby cobra, so yes, we should throw it out.
Having no software patents at all would still be a massive improvement over what we currently have. And we don't know how to build a better system.
Science is expensive. Large-scale high-throughput biomedical science is even more expensive. Clinical trials are EVEN MORE expensive. Where do you expect that the money for all of that comes from.
The bulk of it comes from government grants. Yes, even in the US, it's tax money that's paying for this stuff.
The private "investment" that the pharma companies like to crow about, as justification for their seizing possession of these chemicals for several decades, is primarily investment in marketing and executives (plus some modest investment in production facilities). They don't usually pay for the actual research themselves - governments happily do that, on the grounds that they are serving the public interest, and that it would be "unfair" if they only gave money to public universities and not also to private interests.
It is true that the marketing and executives cost a lot more than the research, so they aren't legally lying when they say they're putting up "most" of the money. But personally, I don't see that as being a very good reason. It only holds together as long as you accept that intensive marketing and multi-million-dollar salary executives are essential to the process (which the pharma company executives do honestly believe, but most of the rest of us dispute).
It seems that on Slashdot, the prevalent opinion is that we should all get whatever we want, whenever we want, for free (or nearly free). That's not how the real world works.
Right. In the real world, the strong (rich) take whatever they want, whenever they want, for free (or nearly free) through the use of force (political or financial), and everybody else gets screwed. As you say, this does not closely correlate with prevailing opinions on how things should work.
Stripped of all the gibberish and delusions, Ballmer's statement comes down to this:
We're going to beat them by being better than them
As corporate visions go, it is fairly typical, and (as usual) completely missing the point. You don't get better by saying that you're going to get better.
If you want to develop with Visual Studio, C#, and.net
You've responded to a question of the form "I already have something to do foo. Why should I switch to this other thing?" by saying something of the form "So that you can replace your thing to do bar with this other thing". This is both irrelevant and circular, since you can just go right back to the first question again.
(.net only looks impressive compared to the MS stuff that came before it. Compared to existing free software development systems, it's mediocre at best; there's nothing in there that the rest of us haven't been doing for five years or more)
If they want it to be proprietary, it's their right.
You seem unclear on the concept of "rights". A "right" is something that a government has decided you may do. This government has decided that they do not have this "right". You can't wave a magic BS stick in the air and make it so that they do. They don't have the right because the EU government bloody well says they don't, and that's all there is to it.
The EU will simply take the money by force. Microsoft has assets moving through the EU, in the form of their revenue from sales of their products. The EU will walk in to the retail outlets and take that revenue until they have their money - the money from every copy of Windows and every xbox sold will go directly to the EU, and Microsoft will never receive it. This is the standard method that courts use for extracting fines from recalcitrant corporations - you don't ban their products, you just take their products.
And they'll keep doing it for as long as it takes.
The exception to this rule being, of course, cases that can be processed in small claims court. Small claims judges really hate people who bring lawyers to those, and superior court judges dislike having cases brought before them that could have been handled in a small claims court.
The small claims system is designed for pro se cases: there are no tricky legal rules to trip you up, and the judges will guide you through the proceedings. It's also a useful test for whether you need a lawyer - if your small claims court won't hear it, then the case is sufficiently complex that you should really hire an expert.
(This case could not be heard in small claims court because the Minnesota limit for claims is $7500)
Now that you've won spectacularly, is it possible to pursue those damages?
As a rough rule, the (new) judge would want to know why you didn't pursue them in the first case, and "I didn't think I would win" is not a satisfactory answer. If something has changed (for example, new evidence has come to light that wasn't available the first time and has a significant impact on the strength of your case) then you can do that sort of thing, otherwise usually not.
(The lawyerly answer would take ten pages and have a lot more details, but basically comes down to "only if something has changed")
No. There's a classic catch-22 in here designed to funnel money to certain interests at the exclusion of all others. Here's the trick: it's illegal to access this data. You cannot create an accurate blacklist without accessing this data, since you would have to review the content. Hence, creating an accurate blacklist is illegal. Anybody who wants to create a blacklist will therefore need political cover to avoid prosecution (this doesn't mean it's legal, it just means that the government "chooses" not to prosecute them). This effectively excludes anybody who might want to create some kind of "open" blacklist.
Just to make it even tighter, a comprehensive review of any blacklist would have to involve accessing the illegal sequences of numbers in order to review them, so any such review is effectively blocked. This means that the people who do collude with the government to produce blacklists have no motivation to make them even remotely accurate.
So cutting off people shall be an alternative that really has to be considered a last resort.
It should be something that only happens if (a) you don't pay, or (b) a court orders it - exactly the same as with a telephone line.
This is all about the media cartel trying to get out of having to prove their cases in court, because their little scam doesn't make a profit when they have to do that.
The problem is, it devalues money by depriving the government of its ability to regulate the supply and value of money. That's why the Secret Service exists.
And as I understand it, devaluing the currency is what the rest of the US government exists to do.
The user receives software and the right to use it, the developer receives goodwill, testers, and advertising.
"Consideration" is something that the user would be required by the contract to give to the developer. It does not mean anything that is a benefit to the developer. The GPL does not have any consideration in favour of the developer.
If the letter is false, then it's just as useless no matter who the author is.
Actually, that's not true, and it's the main reason why you should pay a real lawyer. If what they write is false, then you can claim against their malpractice insurance.
Even if such products existed (Google has never heard of it), HDCP is already more or less broken, so the system's been defeated before getting off the ground.
Not exactly. The "Trusted Computing" system is based on cryptographic verification of the software running on the host. The hypothetical DRM system built on it would send encrypted media to the host OS, which the host would then (using its signed-and-verified player software) decrypt into memory and play. It does not provide any mechanism to play media without decrypting it first, so at some point it's going to move across the memory bus in clear form.
The costs to decap and probe a chip are about $65K
Which is all very nice, but irrelevant, because no chips need to be opened.
You missed it the first time, so I'll say it again: NO CHIPS NEED TO BE OPENED.
It's not like the data stored in SDRAM is encrypted, or could be without crippling the system performance (which the gamer market will never accept, and they're the ones who buy the expensive chips). The connection to the memory is a series of copper traces on the motherboard; you solder a tap onto them and snoop the bus. This can be done with an off-the-shelf FPGA and a small custom PCB plus some development time; rough cost is about $1k plus your effort, or less if you get the kit on ebay. Duplicate for each bus that you need to snoop.
TCPA is all about preventing "wrong" software from being loaded. It does nothing about hardware attacks, because there's really nothing they can do. Hence it will never stop things from being copied, just inconvenience a lot of users.
DRM aims to make it difficult to copy stuff around.
Which is completely futile, because one person copies it the difficult way and the rest just get it from thepiratebay.
And there isn't an off-chip bus carrying unencrypted data around on a real TCP.
Of course there is - the data still goes over the memory and PCI busses, both of which are easily snooped with off-the-shelf components. A TCP is not some kind of magical computer-on-a-chip.
Sure, maybe a million-dollar lab can open the chip inside a suitable vacuum and snoop the internal busses; for most people that's out of range, and the kind of people who run million-dollar labs don't tend to allow their use just to warez the latest game.
The actual costs are a few thousand, and no chips need to be opened. This is how the xbox and wii were cracked.
but that's an endless battle anyways until the trusted computing platform is mainstream
"trusted computing" nonsense won't change anything. It's just another pile of inconvenience for the paying users that will be snipped out entirely for the bittorrent version. Sony and Microsoft have been doing their best to build tamper-proof encryption-based hardware systems (playstation and xbox series), and they're all defeated by a modchip soldered onto the motherboard - you let the tamper-proof hardware do its thing and decrypt the data, then you snoop the data right off the memory bus on its way back from the chip.
Hardware is no harder to attack than software, it just needs different tools. DRM cannot ever work.
Slashdot Mirror
It's really not that hard - stick it in the intergalacic medium where the hydrogen density is low, and accelerate slowly for a few thousand years. You'll get there eventually.
Accelerating to that speed is not hard. Surviving it is hard.
And the vast majority of it is every bit as good as the original, because it's made in the same plants by the same people who do all the other outsourced manufacturing. There is never any particular evidence presented to support the usual claim that the "unauthorized" product has a higher defect rate than the "authorized" product.
This is about whether or not some large US corporation gets their cut of the profits. Nothing more. It should be no surprise that they behave the same way as the mafia.
Unlikely. The need to employ actual mechanics has never been a problem for people running chop shops.
Removing a generic feature from a chip design just isn't that hard. If you make it hard to remove, it won't be generic any more, and it will significantly add to the cost of developing each chip (already huge) - so nobody is going to do that.
The main reason for the absurdly high pay is that the people aren't considered replaceable. Software engineers can be replaced with some random undergrad incompetent (or at least the managers think they can be), so they're paid squat. You can't replace an actor in the middle of a series or movie (usually), so the actor gets to make up any number they like.
When computer synthesis gets good enough to slap any face and voice onto any actor (and we're ten years away from that now, at most - researchers already have crude working models of the technology, it just needs refining), there is going to be a lot of crying.
That's an unlikely scenario anyway. Given the typical behaviour of the US, you're far more likely to start killing your own citizens because it's cheaper than figuring out whether they've done anything. That's more or less what's happening in Gitmo to non-citizens already; it is a small step to start doing it to your own citizens as well (while claiming that "of course" they're all really guilty and the handful of innocents reported by the minor media are just exceptional cases where you "don't have all the facts" - but you can't know the facts for national security reasons, just accept that it's better these people are dead).
That's not true. Very frequently, the scenario operates like this:
Person A has a need for a piece of software to do X.
Person A creates a piece of software to do X.
Person A is now in possession of a piece of software to do X, and has gained from it - he is "paid" by having something to do X, which he did not have before. He created it purely because he needed it. But he's still got that software. He doesn't need to bury it in a hole. So he releases it for other people to use, and in no way does this cost him anything.
Person B has a need for a piece of software to do X and Y. He takes person A's software, and extends it to do Y as well.
The cycle continues. Each person involved benefits from the existence of the software that they need, which would not otherwise exist. Since they all would have had to create the software anyway (since they needed it and it didn't exist), it costs them nothing to let other people use it. And all of them are better off because they have shared the work, rather than each one duplicating it themselves: giving it away has actually gained them something, it hasn't cost them something.
Behind most successful free software projects is a cycle of individual need and gain like this one.
The baby is a baby cobra, so yes, we should throw it out.
Having no software patents at all would still be a massive improvement over what we currently have. And we don't know how to build a better system.
The bulk of it comes from government grants. Yes, even in the US, it's tax money that's paying for this stuff.
The private "investment" that the pharma companies like to crow about, as justification for their seizing possession of these chemicals for several decades, is primarily investment in marketing and executives (plus some modest investment in production facilities). They don't usually pay for the actual research themselves - governments happily do that, on the grounds that they are serving the public interest, and that it would be "unfair" if they only gave money to public universities and not also to private interests.
It is true that the marketing and executives cost a lot more than the research, so they aren't legally lying when they say they're putting up "most" of the money. But personally, I don't see that as being a very good reason. It only holds together as long as you accept that intensive marketing and multi-million-dollar salary executives are essential to the process (which the pharma company executives do honestly believe, but most of the rest of us dispute).
Right. In the real world, the strong (rich) take whatever they want, whenever they want, for free (or nearly free) through the use of force (political or financial), and everybody else gets screwed. As you say, this does not closely correlate with prevailing opinions on how things should work.
As corporate visions go, it is fairly typical, and (as usual) completely missing the point. You don't get better by saying that you're going to get better.
You've responded to a question of the form "I already have something to do foo. Why should I switch to this other thing?" by saying something of the form "So that you can replace your thing to do bar with this other thing". This is both irrelevant and circular, since you can just go right back to the first question again.
(.net only looks impressive compared to the MS stuff that came before it. Compared to existing free software development systems, it's mediocre at best; there's nothing in there that the rest of us haven't been doing for five years or more)
You seem unclear on the concept of "rights". A "right" is something that a government has decided you may do. This government has decided that they do not have this "right". You can't wave a magic BS stick in the air and make it so that they do. They don't have the right because the EU government bloody well says they don't, and that's all there is to it.
The EU will simply take the money by force. Microsoft has assets moving through the EU, in the form of their revenue from sales of their products. The EU will walk in to the retail outlets and take that revenue until they have their money - the money from every copy of Windows and every xbox sold will go directly to the EU, and Microsoft will never receive it. This is the standard method that courts use for extracting fines from recalcitrant corporations - you don't ban their products, you just take their products.
And they'll keep doing it for as long as it takes.
The exception to this rule being, of course, cases that can be processed in small claims court. Small claims judges really hate people who bring lawyers to those, and superior court judges dislike having cases brought before them that could have been handled in a small claims court.
The small claims system is designed for pro se cases: there are no tricky legal rules to trip you up, and the judges will guide you through the proceedings. It's also a useful test for whether you need a lawyer - if your small claims court won't hear it, then the case is sufficiently complex that you should really hire an expert.
(This case could not be heard in small claims court because the Minnesota limit for claims is $7500)
As a rough rule, the (new) judge would want to know why you didn't pursue them in the first case, and "I didn't think I would win" is not a satisfactory answer. If something has changed (for example, new evidence has come to light that wasn't available the first time and has a significant impact on the strength of your case) then you can do that sort of thing, otherwise usually not.
(The lawyerly answer would take ten pages and have a lot more details, but basically comes down to "only if something has changed")
No. There's a classic catch-22 in here designed to funnel money to certain interests at the exclusion of all others. Here's the trick: it's illegal to access this data. You cannot create an accurate blacklist without accessing this data, since you would have to review the content. Hence, creating an accurate blacklist is illegal. Anybody who wants to create a blacklist will therefore need political cover to avoid prosecution (this doesn't mean it's legal, it just means that the government "chooses" not to prosecute them). This effectively excludes anybody who might want to create some kind of "open" blacklist.
Just to make it even tighter, a comprehensive review of any blacklist would have to involve accessing the illegal sequences of numbers in order to review them, so any such review is effectively blocked. This means that the people who do collude with the government to produce blacklists have no motivation to make them even remotely accurate.
It should be something that only happens if (a) you don't pay, or (b) a court orders it - exactly the same as with a telephone line.
This is all about the media cartel trying to get out of having to prove their cases in court, because their little scam doesn't make a profit when they have to do that.
Probably because it's not a very big area. There isn't a large commercial market for forged copies of Windows because TPB has the need covered.
And as I understand it, devaluing the currency is what the rest of the US government exists to do.
"Consideration" is something that the user would be required by the contract to give to the developer. It does not mean anything that is a benefit to the developer. The GPL does not have any consideration in favour of the developer.
Actually, that's not true, and it's the main reason why you should pay a real lawyer. If what they write is false, then you can claim against their malpractice insurance.
Even if such products existed (Google has never heard of it), HDCP is already more or less broken, so the system's been defeated before getting off the ground.
Not exactly. The "Trusted Computing" system is based on cryptographic verification of the software running on the host. The hypothetical DRM system built on it would send encrypted media to the host OS, which the host would then (using its signed-and-verified player software) decrypt into memory and play. It does not provide any mechanism to play media without decrypting it first, so at some point it's going to move across the memory bus in clear form.
Which is all very nice, but irrelevant, because no chips need to be opened.
You missed it the first time, so I'll say it again: NO CHIPS NEED TO BE OPENED.
It's not like the data stored in SDRAM is encrypted, or could be without crippling the system performance (which the gamer market will never accept, and they're the ones who buy the expensive chips). The connection to the memory is a series of copper traces on the motherboard; you solder a tap onto them and snoop the bus. This can be done with an off-the-shelf FPGA and a small custom PCB plus some development time; rough cost is about $1k plus your effort, or less if you get the kit on ebay. Duplicate for each bus that you need to snoop.
TCPA is all about preventing "wrong" software from being loaded. It does nothing about hardware attacks, because there's really nothing they can do. Hence it will never stop things from being copied, just inconvenience a lot of users.
Which is completely futile, because one person copies it the difficult way and the rest just get it from thepiratebay.
Of course there is - the data still goes over the memory and PCI busses, both of which are easily snooped with off-the-shelf components. A TCP is not some kind of magical computer-on-a-chip.
The actual costs are a few thousand, and no chips need to be opened. This is how the xbox and wii were cracked.
"trusted computing" nonsense won't change anything. It's just another pile of inconvenience for the paying users that will be snipped out entirely for the bittorrent version. Sony and Microsoft have been doing their best to build tamper-proof encryption-based hardware systems (playstation and xbox series), and they're all defeated by a modchip soldered onto the motherboard - you let the tamper-proof hardware do its thing and decrypt the data, then you snoop the data right off the memory bus on its way back from the chip.
Hardware is no harder to attack than software, it just needs different tools. DRM cannot ever work.