Actually, companies are only required to comply with valid DMCA notices, for fairly obvious reasons. A company has every right to verify that a notice is valid before taking action. YouTube would have been entirely in its legal rights to ignore the requests it got. It is unfortunate that large internet companies have no interest in defending their users' right to free speech.
From a business perspective, it is not clear that DRM doesn't work. DRM will never stop a determined opponent. But if the amount of casual piracy it deters is greater than the number of people it turns off, it is a net win for the company.
I suppose I just don't see how it deters piracy at all. Before DRM, to pirate a game a casual pirate would use a p2p program to download the game and a key, and then play it. In the DRM era, the casual pirate uses a p2p program to download a cracked version and play it. The only difference is that the person who distributes the initial cracked version has to be slightly more clever - the casual pirate's experience is completely unchanged.
I don't deny that Steam might provide a convenient service to you, but it seems pretty clear that the DRM is doing next to nothing.
Well, steam is fine if you always have a good internet connection, so that you can make quick downloads, and don't miss the bandwidth it uses calling home. More importantly, DRM just doesn't work. People find ways around it, distribute these on the internet, and only people who pay for the product are inconvenienced. I can find and download cracked versions of all of Valve's games using bittorrent faster than you can get them from Steam.
Customers like you are happy with Steam because you have good internet connections and the DRM doesn't work, but this doesn't make it a good compromise. So maybe Steam will survive as an online game retailer in spite of the DRM, but holding it up as an example of successful DRM is ridiculous.
Many of the problems with DRM can be solved by standardisation, but the standard must not only involve a single DRM platform for all software, but also a single online service for authentication. This would be a trusted third party - like a bank. It would assure us that purchases will continue to function after the publisher goes out of business. Steam does both of these things quite well, although we are all assuming that Valve won't go bankrupt and sell its IP to a company with less of a clue.
Standardized DRM would do nothing to fix the primary problem with DRM, which is that it doesn't work. If you standardize DRM it will be no time at all before we have standardized cracks. Besides, there's no particular reason to assume that some third party will be more stable or reliable than game publishers.
Given that their basic business model is broken (providing a service that makes products more difficult to use while failing to prevent piracy) I would in fact go so far as to say that any company like Steam is unlikely to be around in a year or two. The solution for game companies is to find a way to sell something other than the program itself which only they can provide. Given the degree to which games are becoming integrated with the internet, this isn't such an impossible idea.
Would it be like, you know, much "easier" and safer to stop using fossile fuel? Even if it would put development backwards "a bit" for the moment?
Short answer? No.
Even if the political will existed in the first world, China is clearly not interested in playing ball on environmental issues. And with the population as high as it is in China, whatever the first world does isn't going to be enough. And the first world doesn't have the will anyway.
Eventually mankind will eliminate its dependence on fossil fuels. Oil prices will continue to rise, while research continues on alternatives increasing their efficiency and lowering their cost, and when it makes economic sense we'll change, but not before. In the meanwhile, given that stopping oil use altogether is not going to happen, it might be worth considering alternatives. We really don't know exactly what the costs involved in global warming will be (though we have estimates), but if the costs turn out to be high enough, schemes like this one may turn out to be our best option.
I don't like it either, but this 'can't we all just tighten our belts' attitude is naive and unhelpful. It won't happen, and if it somehow did happen it would probably slow development and lead to ultimately greater cost.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That's a lot of bile you seem to have built up against firefox. I'm not sure most people are ready to write mozilla off just yet though.
Some of the ideas behind Chrome sound pretty cool, but I'm not sure a browser that consumes that much in the way of system resources is such a good thing.
Personally, I like to use my web browser constantly - as a quick reference while running many other programs. I might have 5 files up in a text editor, 20 tabs open for quick reference in firefox, and a video or music playing at the same time. I don't have a state of the art computer, and a web browser that uses up that much ram would make my whole system slow down.
At least I run linux, i can't imagine what the slowdown would be like an already bloated operating system like XP or, god forbid, Vista.
Firefox' success over IE is due almost entirely to its being faster and less resource intensive, this is what people want in a browser - and it sounds like chrome fails pretty badly on this front.
The reason itunes' DRM works is that it is completely inefective. If you can burn a cd from the songs, then you can extract the songs losslessly to flac or some similar format. I can take a song from itunes and have a flac to share with all my friends in 5 minutes - hardly a case of apple 'getting it right.'
I think the point you're missing is that the failure of DRM is not that there's anything morally wrong with it - it just plain doesn't work. Either DRM works like itunes where it doesn't do anything, or, worse, in the case of some less clever DRM schemes, DRM significantly inconveniences the casual user while still failing to prevent copying and redistribution by the technically savvy.
I suppose Apple did 'get it right' in one respect: they found a model that satisfies everyone. The record companies are happy, because they're stupid enough to think Apple is defending their interests, and consumers like you are happy because the DRM may as well not be there. This doesn't strike me as a stable equilibrium though.
Actually, in this case maybe you can get a free lunch. Most of the energy you use to walk is more or less wasted. How much is wasted depends on a range of factors, though the type of surface you walk on is probably one of the biggest. Walking on sand uses tons of energy, walking on concrete is better, and walking on one of those rubbery surfaces they use for some moving walkways in airports is a lot better.
There's no reason in principle that you can't make a surface which is easier to walk on than concrete and also extracts some of the energy of the motion.
The real question is if the cost of the new surface is less than the value of the energy you get, and presumably, in this case it is
This would have all sorts of rewards... we would be able to watch the watchers, and we would be able to clearly see those ill conceived laws that are being casually broken all over the place so we could remove them from the books. This would protect us from selective enforcement of laws that aren't meant to be obeyed, but only grant power to the rulers.
I seriously hope this was meant as sarcasm, but I fear it might not have been.
Why should having ubiquitous recording and zero privacy reduce selective enforcement? Instead, we would have a system where almost every citizen is a criminal, and anyone annoying those in power gets his records audited to find something he can be charged with. This would make selective enforcement trivial!
There would be no incentive to remove these laws from the books. Governments want their citizens to be criminals - it makes them easier to control. The system you're describing is, frankly, terrifying.
Devil's advocate here...
One company spends a fortune building a brand image and is so successful that it is *their* product's name that is the first thing you think of when you think of the generic product, and yet you think it's ok to use produce results for their competitors too?
Why should spending lots of money necessarily entitle the company to benefits? There is no reason to assume that a company deserves to get its money's worth. If I throw money into my fireplace, all that I'm entitled to is a slightly brighter fire. By the above reasoning, there should be laws in place that make throwing my money into the fire worth my while.
The reason trademarks exist is to prevent deception of the consumer. Big companies find it very worthwhile to invest in this. As long as it's clear that the competitors being advertised are competitors, there should be no problem. If this isn't clear, they might have a valid argument, but this is easily fixed by making it clear that the ads are for competitors; I can think of no good reason to prevent the ads themselves.
You're making the implicit, and totally unwarranted, assumption that the sole measure of a father's success is his ability to bring in money. Dropping out of IT might mean a drop in income, but it doesn't mean he can't find a different way to make money, which is what I assume he intends. There is absolutely no reason to think that he can't raise his children to be at least as healthy and happy on a smaller income.
Depending on what he goes into, he may end up with more time to devote to his family, which is worth more than money.
I'm not saying money is irrelevant, but it is not nearly so important as some people make it out to be.
A large fraction of Slashdot readers seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of security. First of all, perfect security is neither possible nor desirable.
Any computer connected to the internet is in principle vulnerable since no human being can guarantee that all the software on a modern computer is secure. To only way to get perfect security is to lock your computer in a basement away with no internet connection, or better yet, melt it down. This is obviously impractical. The prime question of security is how much convenience you're willing to sacrifice for security.
So, will a USB stick with preinstalled aps give perfect security? No. But it will avoid the majority of attacks with very little inconvenience.
Personally I like the suggestion above to use VNC with single session passwords, and all web passwords saved on the server, since this seems like a relatively low effort approach which will avoid the vast majority of security issues. That said, I think the USB stick idea is perfectly reasonable.
I have to agree here. The airforce must have a policy of encrypting any confidential e-mail. The fact that some guy with a website was getting e-mails meant for the airbase is completely irrelevant to security, and the airforce was entirely right to ignore the problem. For e-mail you have to assume that your messages can be intercepted in any case when you're dealing with security - encryption is the only reasonable solution. Now, if someone in the airforce is sending e-mails with important information without using encryption, that is a security breach, but TFA doesn't seem to have any idea what encryption is.
If I had to guess, I would say that this is some overzealous reporter with no understanding of computer security making a big deal out of nothing. That, or a single individual in the airforce has made a serious mistake by not encrypting his e-mail, and he's going to be in a lot of trouble. If the later is the case, the fact that this random guy was receiving misdirected e-mail is actually a boon to security, since it has helped to identify a breach which might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
Actually, diamonds probably aren't worth the trouble of asteroid mining. Crushed diamond powder is cheap and plentiful right here on earth. It's only the larger chunks of diamond that are valued much, and even those aren't in short supply. The price of diamonds is only as high as it is because a cartel of the major producers work in collusion to keep the prices up. I suppose diamonds from asteroid mining might force them to lower their prices a bit, but it's unlikely that mining asteroids for diamonds could successfully compete with earth based diamond mining.
Quite possibly if we do end up with asteroid miners, they'll be throwing away cheap carbon compounds like diamonds, in favor of useful ores like iron or nickel.
It's worth keeping in mind that security isn't an end in and of itself. If the cost of improving security in terms of time and money is greater than the loses you're taking, it makes absolutely no sense to implement that security - which is a fact a lot of the security minded on slashdot seem oblivious to. The beancounters should be in charge of the final decisions for security since they're the ones who have the information to judge whether a security measure is worthwhile. That said, obviously the decision should be based on cost assessments made by the security people who actually know what they're doing, and if they're smart, the beancounters will listen to them.
Probably with the upswing in losses, the banks are going to be willing to cut less corners in security, since economically that's going to start to make sense.
So... basically they've promised not to litigate in cases where they probably wouldn't have bothered to litigate anyway. I suppose in return they're hoping to get good will and increased success rates for the spurious litigation they do engage in?
It's going to be what? Six months to a year before we have open source phones via Android or OpenMoko. I'm guessing some sort of music downloading software via either WiFi or cellular internet won't be far behind. Limewire's already written in Java, so a port for Android can't be that hard.
Even ignoring open source phones, we're not far from the day when internet through the cell phone is standard. Especially as free WiFi becomes more widespread, people are going to start to expect their cell phones to tap into that even if they aren't paying for internet packages and the cost of those internet packages is going to have to drop as people get used to the idea of free internet. I think it's pretty clear who's going to win when MusicStation Max is forced to compete on an open market against the likes of iTunes.
I hope the people behind MusicStation Max have to sense to realize that their business model is only going to be any good in the very short term.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, companies are only required to comply with valid DMCA notices, for fairly obvious reasons. A company has every right to verify that a notice is valid before taking action. YouTube would have been entirely in its legal rights to ignore the requests it got. It is unfortunate that large internet companies have no interest in defending their users' right to free speech.
From a business perspective, it is not clear that DRM doesn't work. DRM will never stop a determined opponent. But if the amount of casual piracy it deters is greater than the number of people it turns off, it is a net win for the company.
I suppose I just don't see how it deters piracy at all. Before DRM, to pirate a game a casual pirate would use a p2p program to download the game and a key, and then play it. In the DRM era, the casual pirate uses a p2p program to download a cracked version and play it. The only difference is that the person who distributes the initial cracked version has to be slightly more clever - the casual pirate's experience is completely unchanged.
I don't deny that Steam might provide a convenient service to you, but it seems pretty clear that the DRM is doing next to nothing.
Well, steam is fine if you always have a good internet connection, so that you can make quick downloads, and don't miss the bandwidth it uses calling home. More importantly, DRM just doesn't work. People find ways around it, distribute these on the internet, and only people who pay for the product are inconvenienced. I can find and download cracked versions of all of Valve's games using bittorrent faster than you can get them from Steam.
Customers like you are happy with Steam because you have good internet connections and the DRM doesn't work, but this doesn't make it a good compromise. So maybe Steam will survive as an online game retailer in spite of the DRM, but holding it up as an example of successful DRM is ridiculous.
Many of the problems with DRM can be solved by standardisation, but the standard must not only involve a single DRM platform for all software, but also a single online service for authentication. This would be a trusted third party - like a bank. It would assure us that purchases will continue to function after the publisher goes out of business. Steam does both of these things quite well, although we are all assuming that Valve won't go bankrupt and sell its IP to a company with less of a clue.
Standardized DRM would do nothing to fix the primary problem with DRM, which is that it doesn't work. If you standardize DRM it will be no time at all before we have standardized cracks. Besides, there's no particular reason to assume that some third party will be more stable or reliable than game publishers.
Given that their basic business model is broken (providing a service that makes products more difficult to use while failing to prevent piracy) I would in fact go so far as to say that any company like Steam is unlikely to be around in a year or two. The solution for game companies is to find a way to sell something other than the program itself which only they can provide. Given the degree to which games are becoming integrated with the internet, this isn't such an impossible idea.
Would it be like, you know, much "easier" and safer to stop using fossile fuel? Even if it would put development backwards "a bit" for the moment?
Short answer? No.
Even if the political will existed in the first world, China is clearly not interested in playing ball on environmental issues. And with the population as high as it is in China, whatever the first world does isn't going to be enough. And the first world doesn't have the will anyway.
Eventually mankind will eliminate its dependence on fossil fuels. Oil prices will continue to rise, while research continues on alternatives increasing their efficiency and lowering their cost, and when it makes economic sense we'll change, but not before. In the meanwhile, given that stopping oil use altogether is not going to happen, it might be worth considering alternatives. We really don't know exactly what the costs involved in global warming will be (though we have estimates), but if the costs turn out to be high enough, schemes like this one may turn out to be our best option.
I don't like it either, but this 'can't we all just tighten our belts' attitude is naive and unhelpful. It won't happen, and if it somehow did happen it would probably slow development and lead to ultimately greater cost.
That's a lot of bile you seem to have built up against firefox. I'm not sure most people are ready to write mozilla off just yet though.
Some of the ideas behind Chrome sound pretty cool, but I'm not sure a browser that consumes that much in the way of system resources is such a good thing.
Personally, I like to use my web browser constantly - as a quick reference while running many other programs. I might have 5 files up in a text editor, 20 tabs open for quick reference in firefox, and a video or music playing at the same time. I don't have a state of the art computer, and a web browser that uses up that much ram would make my whole system slow down.
At least I run linux, i can't imagine what the slowdown would be like an already bloated operating system like XP or, god forbid, Vista.
Firefox' success over IE is due almost entirely to its being faster and less resource intensive, this is what people want in a browser - and it sounds like chrome fails pretty badly on this front.
The reason itunes' DRM works is that it is completely inefective. If you can burn a cd from the songs, then you can extract the songs losslessly to flac or some similar format. I can take a song from itunes and have a flac to share with all my friends in 5 minutes - hardly a case of apple 'getting it right.'
I think the point you're missing is that the failure of DRM is not that there's anything morally wrong with it - it just plain doesn't work. Either DRM works like itunes where it doesn't do anything, or, worse, in the case of some less clever DRM schemes, DRM significantly inconveniences the casual user while still failing to prevent copying and redistribution by the technically savvy.
I suppose Apple did 'get it right' in one respect: they found a model that satisfies everyone. The record companies are happy, because they're stupid enough to think Apple is defending their interests, and consumers like you are happy because the DRM may as well not be there. This doesn't strike me as a stable equilibrium though.
Actually, in this case maybe you can get a free lunch. Most of the energy you use to walk is more or less wasted. How much is wasted depends on a range of factors, though the type of surface you walk on is probably one of the biggest. Walking on sand uses tons of energy, walking on concrete is better, and walking on one of those rubbery surfaces they use for some moving walkways in airports is a lot better.
There's no reason in principle that you can't make a surface which is easier to walk on than concrete and also extracts some of the energy of the motion.
The real question is if the cost of the new surface is less than the value of the energy you get, and presumably, in this case it is
I seriously hope this was meant as sarcasm, but I fear it might not have been.
Why should having ubiquitous recording and zero privacy reduce selective enforcement? Instead, we would have a system where almost every citizen is a criminal, and anyone annoying those in power gets his records audited to find something he can be charged with. This would make selective enforcement trivial!
There would be no incentive to remove these laws from the books. Governments want their citizens to be criminals - it makes them easier to control. The system you're describing is, frankly, terrifying.
Why should spending lots of money necessarily entitle the company to benefits? There is no reason to assume that a company deserves to get its money's worth. If I throw money into my fireplace, all that I'm entitled to is a slightly brighter fire. By the above reasoning, there should be laws in place that make throwing my money into the fire worth my while.
The reason trademarks exist is to prevent deception of the consumer. Big companies find it very worthwhile to invest in this. As long as it's clear that the competitors being advertised are competitors, there should be no problem. If this isn't clear, they might have a valid argument, but this is easily fixed by making it clear that the ads are for competitors; I can think of no good reason to prevent the ads themselves.
You're making the implicit, and totally unwarranted, assumption that the sole measure of a father's success is his ability to bring in money. Dropping out of IT might mean a drop in income, but it doesn't mean he can't find a different way to make money, which is what I assume he intends. There is absolutely no reason to think that he can't raise his children to be at least as healthy and happy on a smaller income.
Depending on what he goes into, he may end up with more time to devote to his family, which is worth more than money.
I'm not saying money is irrelevant, but it is not nearly so important as some people make it out to be.
A large fraction of Slashdot readers seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of security. First of all, perfect security is neither possible nor desirable.
Any computer connected to the internet is in principle vulnerable since no human being can guarantee that all the software on a modern computer is secure. To only way to get perfect security is to lock your computer in a basement away with no internet connection, or better yet, melt it down. This is obviously impractical. The prime question of security is how much convenience you're willing to sacrifice for security.
So, will a USB stick with preinstalled aps give perfect security? No. But it will avoid the majority of attacks with very little inconvenience.
Personally I like the suggestion above to use VNC with single session passwords, and all web passwords saved on the server, since this seems like a relatively low effort approach which will avoid the vast majority of security issues. That said, I think the USB stick idea is perfectly reasonable.
I have to agree here. The airforce must have a policy of encrypting any confidential e-mail. The fact that some guy with a website was getting e-mails meant for the airbase is completely irrelevant to security, and the airforce was entirely right to ignore the problem. For e-mail you have to assume that your messages can be intercepted in any case when you're dealing with security - encryption is the only reasonable solution. Now, if someone in the airforce is sending e-mails with important information without using encryption, that is a security breach, but TFA doesn't seem to have any idea what encryption is.
If I had to guess, I would say that this is some overzealous reporter with no understanding of computer security making a big deal out of nothing. That, or a single individual in the airforce has made a serious mistake by not encrypting his e-mail, and he's going to be in a lot of trouble. If the later is the case, the fact that this random guy was receiving misdirected e-mail is actually a boon to security, since it has helped to identify a breach which might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
Actually, diamonds probably aren't worth the trouble of asteroid mining. Crushed diamond powder is cheap and plentiful right here on earth. It's only the larger chunks of diamond that are valued much, and even those aren't in short supply. The price of diamonds is only as high as it is because a cartel of the major producers work in collusion to keep the prices up. I suppose diamonds from asteroid mining might force them to lower their prices a bit, but it's unlikely that mining asteroids for diamonds could successfully compete with earth based diamond mining.
Quite possibly if we do end up with asteroid miners, they'll be throwing away cheap carbon compounds like diamonds, in favor of useful ores like iron or nickel.
It's worth keeping in mind that security isn't an end in and of itself. If the cost of improving security in terms of time and money is greater than the loses you're taking, it makes absolutely no sense to implement that security - which is a fact a lot of the security minded on slashdot seem oblivious to. The beancounters should be in charge of the final decisions for security since they're the ones who have the information to judge whether a security measure is worthwhile. That said, obviously the decision should be based on cost assessments made by the security people who actually know what they're doing, and if they're smart, the beancounters will listen to them.
Probably with the upswing in losses, the banks are going to be willing to cut less corners in security, since economically that's going to start to make sense.
So... basically they've promised not to litigate in cases where they probably wouldn't have bothered to litigate anyway. I suppose in return they're hoping to get good will and increased success rates for the spurious litigation they do engage in?
It's going to be what? Six months to a year before we have open source phones via Android or OpenMoko. I'm guessing some sort of music downloading software via either WiFi or cellular internet won't be far behind. Limewire's already written in Java, so a port for Android can't be that hard. Even ignoring open source phones, we're not far from the day when internet through the cell phone is standard. Especially as free WiFi becomes more widespread, people are going to start to expect their cell phones to tap into that even if they aren't paying for internet packages and the cost of those internet packages is going to have to drop as people get used to the idea of free internet. I think it's pretty clear who's going to win when MusicStation Max is forced to compete on an open market against the likes of iTunes. I hope the people behind MusicStation Max have to sense to realize that their business model is only going to be any good in the very short term.
This is why restrooms should all have computer terminals installed in the stalls.
They're coming: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/31/021820 2