Security through obscurity is not the best gameplan, and in fact it's not Apple's. Real and DVD Jon have both reverse engineered Fairplay - comprehending encryption does not magically allow it to be broken.
Sigh. Repeating a mantra without truly comprehending what you're talking about is sophomoric and, to be blunt, retarded.
What you totally neglect is that this is most definitely not simply "encryption". We're not worried about interlopers/men in the middle, so much as what happens, at the recipient's computer both with the decryption keys and with the resulting decrypted data stream. Only someone that is fundamentally ignorant of underlying technology would believe Apple would be better off if they disclosed their specifications/code for all to see. Any idiot that knows jack about programming could trivially alter the code to save the keys to make it accessible to other applications or simply dump out the data in its unencrypted format.
Even if Apple theoretically employed a non-optimal encryption algorithm or implemented it poorly that issue is very small in practice. If cracking the encryption only takes more than a few hours most consumers aren't going to bother and, in all likelyhood, it would be much longer than this (unless you assume Apple can't afford to hire programmers that are able to deploy well understood algorithms effectively).
As for DVD John et. al, I fully recognize that their DRM and, in fact, _any_ DRM running on untrusted hardware is going to be broken eventually -- it is inevitable. That is a huge part of my point why Apple simply cannot afford to ossify DRM into some standard OR openly share the algorithms/keys (many vendors may choose to leak it to hurt Apple). DRM vendors like Apple need to keep it both OBSCURE and MOVING TARGET in order for it to be good enough to keep the majority of consumers from cracking it en masse. Openly sharing their design/code with a bunch of different vendors would hurt the effective security on both counts.
FairPlay took awhile to come out. It worked for awhile, then stopped working several times between versions...and then stopped working entirely. The average user could hardly keep up. There was a LONG period where there weren't any cracks available and the ones that exist now only work in REAL TIME and, even then, they lose all the metadata and such...and it will likely be broken again, long before most people
You are presenting a false choice. The underlying issue is that by keeping Fairplay proprietary, Apple preserves a tremendous competitive advantage. Theirs is the only long standing, widely used music DRM system, and the majors will not license non-DRMed digital distribution. Much to the label's chagrin, this also enhances Apple's bargaining position by buttressing their position as market leader. In fact, it is labels who have the most to gain by breaking open Fairplay licensing - and of course, it is they who are advocating it.
Wrong. I acknowledged that this system benefits Apple, this however does not mean that they don't have any valid reasons for keeping it to themselves either. You may disagree that Apple openly sharing their specification wouldn't hurt the integrity of the system, but you obviously don't understand the situation.
As for the labels, they have a lot more leverage than you acknowledge. They can simply choose not to sell to Apple anymore if they're all that unhappy with it. They can and do sell their music through Microsoft and other vendors too.
IMHO, the talk about specs -> cracking is just the usual stuff you hear from people who either don't know jack or wish to set up strawmen.
As I said before, it is you who fails to understand the issue. As to the "strawman", you obviously have no idea what the f*** that even means. I am directly critizing their regulation. You may disagree, but it's only a strawman argument if I put words/arguments in their mouth. While you're at it, you may want to look up ad hominem as this is precisely what you're attempting.
What a great country I live in. Here we have legislators in the pockets of media companies proposing laws that would require DRM, but in Europe, the legislators (apparantly acting on behalf of the populus, which is what I thought the "of the people, by the people, and for the people" US government is SUPPOSED to do) are rightly saying that DRM is unfair to the people.
Which "people" are you referring to? I am a US citizen and I would disagree vehemently with this sort of action. I would rather a government that treats us like adults instead of coddling us constantly. I am a rational and intelligent person that is perfectly capable of making this call on my own. Yes, in certain rare circumstances it might make sense to have the government intervene (like in the case of a true monopoly in a mature market). This, however, is an act of government overstepping its bounds. DRM is in its infancy and it's going to take awhile to get right. There are several other options out there for people that find Apple's system too onerous.
Yes, DRM is a pain sometimes (primarily because I have to use iTunes or an Ipod to play ITMS music). It would be nice to be able to play this stuff on my SONOS music system directly and other players....
Yes, I'm sure Apple benefits as a result of its lock-in.
However, I also suspect that it is unlikely that Apple could securely share (without people leaking) the specifications with a half-dozen different manufacturers and also keep all those different software/devices in sync with the latest DRM state (so that they could stay one-step ahead of the crackers... at least as far as the average user is concerned). The only way I see this working is if Apple could distribute binary/objects and mandate a framework for internet auto-update across all the platforms...even then I think it's a stretch.
Yes, I know some of you anti-IP people couldn't give a damn about the rights of the industry to protect its own property from illegal distribution, but this voter couldn't disagree more strongly. I'd rather face the lock-in with Apple (which, imho, still has a very good and product overall) than risk losing an effective DRM system entirely. It's possible that various copyright owners may survive without DRM, but I'd rather preserve the option (which requires avoiding hamhanded government regulation) and allow things to evolve before contemplating regulation like this.
Is this a great country, or what?
It has its flaws, but yes. On the whole I'd rather be here than anywhere else.
You can mark me -5 TROLL now. Disagreeing with Slashdot Dogma: pro-DRM (-1) pro-IP (-1) pro-US (-1) pro-mainstream platform (-1) anti- "consumer" (-1)
Until there is decent hardware to read books on, projects like this aren't going anywhere beyond niche markets.
I love books, I own a few thousand of them and buy new ones every few months. I don't own a single ebook and I doubt I ever will because I've yet to see an ebook reader that was superior to an actual book. The only benefit to ebook readers over physical books are portability and storage capacity. The problem with this is that neither of these are big problems with physical books - if I'm going on a long trip it's not a big deal to bring even a few full sized hardbacks along to read. I don't need to have a library of books on my person at any time, the most books I've ever needed to bring with me anywhere at one time (since high school) was 4, and that was to read on a flight to the other side of the planet. I don't often fly to the other side of the planet.
Well I used to feel much the same way: I abstained from buying any of the earlier ebook readers and would never ever even consider really trying to read anything on a PDA/laptop/etc, but the new eInk devices work pretty well. I've got the new Sony eBook Reader and I'm quite happy with it. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not ready to throw out books just yet (and I read at least 2 books a week on average), but it's definitely getting close. I'd give it another few more years to start gaining real mainstream traction.
Legibility is perfectly good, imho, comparable to a decent paperback. I've read about 20 novels on this thing since I purchased it and I haven't had any problems.
What it's lacking right now is:
1) Equally good online selection & equivalent prices (though improved since Nov?) -- there is a small premium on most things (esp. considering I can't readily share it with friends/family), though frankly I don't mind it that much (being able to get what I want now is kinda nice... kind of like iTunes is to Ipod... only not quite as slick).
2) Better firmware. Stupid quirks, which are perfectly fixable, exist in the software. For instance, if I walk away from the book and brush it against something, it'll cause the pages to skip forwards or backwards by some large number... there's no easy way to simply return to where I left off unless I vigilently bookmarked every several pages as I read (and this compounded by 2 second refresh time for flipping through--doesn't matter when you read, but it does when you want to flip through something quickly). A few lines of code could fix this #$@$
3) Some small form factor changes. The buttons are in kind of a wierd place.
4) Battery life could use some improvement. I may be alone in this, but I've only been able to get 2-3 novels per charge or about 1.5K pages. This is about 1/2 or 1/3 the number they quoted. Not a show stopper, but it'd help its long term ability to replace books.
5) An integrated backlight/frontlight would be nice... a real advantage over paperbacks, though I guess Sony chose not to for marketing reasons.
Overall, I find it's very nice to have though. I do like not having to carry several books with me when I travel (especially hardbacks -- I'd PAY the same price softback just for the privledge of not having to deal with them). I often find myself needing to carry more than 4 books and even that is a pain for me since I like to travel light (avoid checking bags in almost all of my trips). It's also nice being able to copy text files, PDFs and such to it for review. I don't often find myself wanting to read stuff that is in the public domain stuff, but it could save you real money if you do. This is where I see eBooks really gaining a foothold in the short run -- applications where commercial printed books simply aren't available (e.g, more nice/obscure works, personal papers, public domain stuff, etc). I also envision niche markets sprouting up precisely because of this technolog
If you ran one such scam per week making 5% each time on an initial investment of (say) $10000, you would make around $110,000 in profit your first year. Once these guys have their spam bots set up, keeping this scam going would require maybe 30 mins/day.
Only if you assume that they re-invest all of their proceeds with each investment, i.e., compound it. Of course, it would be virtually impossible to get your money in and out of one of these penny stocks like this with any investment approaching $100K, as the penny stocks that these schemes are forced to target are for too thinly traded to support that kind of investment. Most of these penny stocks only see around 2K-3K shares traded per day or just around $2.5K total. One quick 100K investment would drive the price up well in excess of the response (sucker) and when they try to sell the stock (after it's presumably peaked) they'd have real difficulty trying to get all of their money at at anything approaching price they're hoping for. They'd probably end up losing money at that rate.
Furthermore, as to the ability to sustain this model with automated scripts... I doubt it. I think sure they're looking for OTC stocks that are both stable (not falling... so they don't screw themselves) and on the uptick (so their suckers don't see it and freak out). They also need some kind of story that they can sell.... given the relatively small number of OTC stocks out there (just a few thousand), I think the opportunities are actually quite narrow.
In other words, the market for these schemes only exists for a small number of small-time (low-fund) spammers. This is probably why these schemes aren't over-running our mailboxes today. I mean they're a nuisance, but we don't see hundreds of seperate schemes a day or anything approaching that.
"It is probably safe to say that the possible number of snow crystal shapes exceeds the estimated number of atoms in the known universe..."
This sort of thing does my head in. Anyone else trying to keep up?
Makes sense to me. The operating word is possible, as in the number of possible arrangements of unique snow crystal shapes likely exceeds the estimated number of actual atoms in the universe that we know of. This isn't terribly different than saying that number of possible lego combinations exceeds the number of legos in the world (well, I don't really know how many lego combinations are possible.... but you get my point). Though IANAA & IANAM:-)
I find it hard to believe someone can't track those who benefit from these crimes.
We have to request permission before we buy & sell pretty much any listed security, just to satisfy our internal compliance people who in turn have to report to The Feds.
So why on earth is it so hard for The Feds to track who purchases larges quantities of these securities before such solicitations are made, and who conveniently dump shortly before these same shares crash? After all, we're only talking 5% here! There must be large sums of money whizzing about...
None of these individual spam/scams are for truly "large sums" since they're just trying to manipulate penny stocks. With our current regulatory framework the response to any individual scam would almost certainly cost a lot more than damage of the scam itself. What's more, many of these spammers are actually disclosing their conflict of interest which arguably gives them legal coverage. You also must then factor in that the SEC needs to find these spam emails to actually stop it in time...and to prosecute it they need to discover who is behind it, prove who actually sent it, quite possibly extradite people, etc.
Of course, if these spammers average one of these scams per week (@~5% return/scam) and re-invest all of their funds in each successive scam, that theoretically adds up to roughly 1200% return/year... it's fairly attractive, although they'd probably find very much diminishing returns and run into problems as they try to invest too much of their money into any one stock (too illiquid to do it successfully).
It'd probably just be far more effective to detect these spams and warn the suckers before they trade. In other words, design a system with postini and other anti-spam mechanisms to aggregate these type of spams, parse them, and ***WARN*** the potential buyers (suckers) through etrade and other electronic intermediares (that the unsophisticated buyers are likely using) that they're about to buy a stock that is almost certainly being manipulated (with more than just the typical legalese one sees these days)...
Unbelievably, it appears that spammers are able to achieve a 5% gain on pumped stock before dumping it, along with a dramatic increase in transaction volume of the stock.
This tidbit, like the article itself, is interesting but should not be the least bit surprising to anyone with a little common sense and knowledge of the fundamentals (stocks & spam). If anything, I suspect the sophisticated spammers are doing quite a bit better than this. The pump&dump spammers are targeting stocks (OTC/Pink sheet) that are extremely thinly traded (low trading volume) and have low share price. In other words, the stocks they're targeting average around 2-3K shares traded per day with an average prices typically much less than an a dollar/share (in other words, just a few thousand dollars a day). All it takes is very small response rate, just a handful of suckers that actually get interested in the stock, to drive up the volume and the price of the stock. The low prices of these stocks also makes it easier to dupe people into buying them because they're so cheap. It would be virtually impossible for the traders to make a living by doing this on heavily traded stocks (too little marginal impact/too much other events, risk, too high price, etc).
We are not talking about manufacturing. Describing what people create as goods is probably at the heart of some of our society's problems.
Regardless of the word you want to apply to it, you need a credible alternative.
I also take exception to your idea that everything has to be looked at from a cost recovery or profit model. Electricity, telephone service, post offices and so forth all had a period where they were not profitable - but were developed by governments as a social good. We already have a model - you just can't see it from the framework you insist on using.
First, there is a huge difference between installing/servicing basic (non-novel) utilities and inventing/creating intellectual goods like software, newspapers, novels, music, reference books, magazines, etc. Relying on the government to create or subsidize the production of these works means that we depend on government to determine the "right" value for each thing and know what is or is not feasible. In other words, you propose that we centrally plan intellectual works and this sort of thing has failed time and time again. There are times when government actions, subsidy, or even monopoly/regulation are the only reasonable answer, but it should be a last resort.
Second, government spending is not "free", nor is the burden equally shared under our existing tax system. Most of us can agree that we need national freeways in general, but not many of us are going to agree that we need to subsidize, say, the latest work from Tom Clancy, let alone works from highly divisive figures like Noam Chomsky or Pat Buchanan. (Not to mention the fact that the government couldn't fund anything directly touching/commenting on religion) I find it ironic that someone could object morally to charging the actual consumer for the right to consume a work, but has no problem forcing someone else to foot the bill for that same action(especially those who have the nerve to be most productive) -- in my opinion the former (copyright) is far more just than the latter (much higher taxes for non-uniformally appreciated non-essentials).
Third, electricity, telephone service, rail roads, and other critical utilities were all largely installed wholly by private industry. Regulation and government-granted monopolies came later. It should be noted that government's role in actually subsidizing most of these works is very much the exception (rural areas, certain counties, etc). As for the postal service, you should note that this is not only government corporation, but a nationwide monopoly: with the exception for so-called "urgent" messages (where they've been thorougly trounced), no one is allowed to compete with them.
The advantage that you have here is that you are supporting the status quo. You are asserting that any change to IP has to give you all the things you value - and it needs to be proved before you try it. Not much incentive for me to spend time trying to think of a solution.
You aren't even beginning to approach 10% and if you want to convince anyone, you're going to have to do a lot better.
Especially since I can also take the point of view of the status quo and watch how people will ignore the notion of IP because it doesn't make sense. I can afford to wait because there will be an IP crisis - and the harder you try to support old notions of IP in a changed environment, the more those laws will be ignored or broken.
Some people may try to infringe, but copyright has effectively stopped the most aggregious facilitators of it (esp. Napster). We also have DRM, various copy protection mechanisms, etc. What consumers before could simply copy they now have to constantly scour the net for the latest tools to facilitate it. You think that if copyright crumbles and DRM and similar mechanisms crumble we'll have a bunch of stuff in the public dom
You don't keep "something you have" (keys, tokens, etc) or "something you are" (retina, fingers, etc) in your computer. Therefore, MITM (man in the middle) would not work even if someone pwns your computer. That is the whole point of two factor auth.
Not quite. SecurID and similar schemes makes it a lot harder, but there's no reason why someone couldn't perform a man in the middle attack while the victim is attempting to log-into the service. Once the victim types in the key, they could simply cancel/kill the victim's session (or computer) and then proceed to use the victim's key on the service. Of course, SecurID and other implementations make this much harder since the window of opportunity is at most ~30 seconds (or whatever the duration the key is valid for) -- the hacker would have to be very quick.
The question is who did the people of Florida actually intend to be president. I don't care if it "would take a long time", the point is to accurately reflect the will of the people. We need to trust that the system is working correctly. The hasty intervention of the Supreme Court needlessly opened a deep wound in this country. Many felt that it was justice denied not "sparing" us anything.
The point is that no legally acceptable recount would have allowed Gore to win. Trying to divine intent outside of the law is dangerous and far more divisive. The Supreme Court did not stop Gore from winning, they prevented his loss from being dragged out and creating even more divisiveness.
Now as to who the people of Florida actually intended to elect it is pretty clear that it was Gore. Check out this summary from USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2001-05-10 -recountmain.htm.
The fact remains that there was no legally acceptable standard by which they could reliably divine the intent of the voter. Furthermore, if you're truly going to talk about what "the people of Florida" intended and excuse voting mistakes, then you should also acknowledge that there is a very good chance the the media swayed the election by calling the state for Gore an hour before the polls were closed in the heavily Republican leaning panhandle. We have no idea how many Republican voters chose not to vote as a result. This could easily have swayed the election far in excess of any actual botched votes for Gore.
It is interesting to note that there we a lot structural issues that were working against Gore.
Most of those "structural" issues that were truly biased against Gore were in Palm Beach, a county that is heavily managed by Democrats and for Democrats. They changed the ballot. What's more, it's extremely rare for Presidential elections to be so close that such a mistake could even potentially sway the election. The other issues that seemed to work against Gore had little to do with the system and everything to do with the voter (not being able to read, follow directions, or understand election law).
So why are we even talking about this? Because until we have a voting system that everyone can trust we are not really living in a democracy.
I disagree. Although I'm all for making reasonable changes to the voting system to eliminate errors, even those flawed systems would rarely shape an election outcome and even if they did it would be very difficult to claim that there was a clear voter preference. There's a certain amount of luck and chance involved when you get to these margins. In any event, my biggest objection was to the over-reaction of election officials/voting republic.... "Oh No, We can't use paper! Let's go digital"... and completely ignore all the flaws.
We're never going to have a 100% accurate/fair voting system and people need to be adult about it when we have outcomes that get that close (within the margin of error). I'd far rather reduce the election when it gets that close to a coin toss than drag the country through it multiple recounts, court battles, etc.
There is a difference between information and food. You can share information and you still have exactly what you started with. You can't do the same for food. As for making the case for a different model, I'd rather not get wrapped up in the details. I simply made the assertion that it was possible and suggested that people might do things for reasons other than revenue that would make the point moot.
I'll grant you that there are important differences between physical goods and intellectual goods, but that does not let you off the hook with respect to the actual production of intellectual goods (both towards the covering of R&D costs and as incentive to take that risk). The "details", as you call them, are fundamental to the entire pursuit.
You and I disagree on the open issue. It's not really a matter of proof. It's more of a matter of worldview.
That depends on your position. If you're merely advocating that we let people try alternative model_X, I certainly won't stop you (even if I suspect that said system will fail in most cases). If you're saying, let's scrap the entire system of copyright, then I submit that you need, at bare minimum, a credible and convincing alternative for most of the goods which we value and a credible reason why we should be forced to abandon IP. In addition, if the alternative is allegedly better and can operate concurrently with copyright, the system should simply be employed side-by-side.
Also, it is probably worth mentioning that there are people trying different models for news. I mentioned Indymedia, which some might say is a failure, but there needs to be some experiment for something new to be developed - and as your argument illustrates, developing a new model for news is not a trivial problem.
I'm happy that other people are trying different systems even if I don't think they're very good or likely to scale. Under our current system we can support these alternatives. Though I would point out that that site is claiming copyright authority to prevent "commercial republication" -- which would rule out your meta-newservices and open access.
I do analysis and contract information for business organizations for a living. My experience is that access and the ability to use information is something even large firms often don't do well. Most aren't even aware what is out there and why they need it (which to be fair the products are continually changing and you do need someone that specializes in this sort of thing to provide the balance you speak of)..
I'd say large organizations are particularly afflicted with this, but it has much less to do with lack of the availability of the resource (available information). It's a matter of apathy, inertia, risk-aversion, etc. In other words, it's a matter of wanting to spend the time to intelligently use the resource and then apply it. Even if all the news is bundled up in one place for free, it's never going to be pre-digested into little soundbytes that are directly relevant to the particular organization. Someone has to interpret the information and apply it meaningfully. Even with the meaningful information, someone has to be willing and able to act (which tends to be the biggest problem).
How do you define "success"?
I'd say success is both consumer adoption and having an all-around high quality product that your target audience would actually want to use (which adoption over the long run tends to correlate well with). People are a lot smarter than they're often made out to be on forums like slashdot, at least, when it comes to issues they can tangibly appreciate. There may be some lag time, but if a product is truly equal or better while costing a fraction as much, then there's really no way it's going to continue to lose unless there are huge network effects or transition costs th
Reducing the duration of patents would solve this particular problem. There would be motivation to get the drug on the market quickly and make one's profits. If the durations were decreased, then drug profits would be decreased, which means that the drug companies would have even more motivation to produce more medications in the hope of getting a major hit.
This is a total non-sequitur.
First, drug companies have a huge incentive to rush a drug to market once they believe it is safe and effective. They've invested hundreds of millions of dollars -- they're not going to delay their ability to reap the profits unnecessarily. Even if you assume it wouldn't impact their patent life on market, the shareholders and management are highly motivated to make it happen ASAP.
Second, the patent duration is relatively fixed in practice and they maximize their time on market with patent protection by getting it there more quickly. The absolute most they can gain is 5 years for the testing and regulatory review process, but no more than 14 years post-approval, and the FDA reduces time spent in testing (non-agency review) by half. So if they drag a clinical trial out for 2 years longer than necessary, they'd lose 1 year effectively. Most drugs have less 10 years on market before the patent expires.
Third, drug companies can't make "too much" money for shareholders. They want to maximize their investment. If they've identified a drug that might worthwhile, they're going to patent it ASAP to prevent their competitors from beating them to the punch. Once they've done that the clock starts counting against them and they would be stupid to sit around on something that they have good cause to believe would work.
The research in question was funded by a Canadian federal government agency, and I'm certain that one or two well-funded, non-profit and/or public sector agencies will step up to the plate to study whether the proposed treatment is safe, and if so, some smart non-intellectual-property-driven and yet profitable organization will market it.
This misunderstanding is typical of you anti-patent people. You can buy this drug at drug stores today. No need for generic manufacturers to produce it. You need someone who will actually spend a lot of bunch to test the drug and prove that it is safe. All they have right now is some evidence that it works in a petri dish and in mice.
There is a very real chance that the drug won't work (cancer and diabetes discoveries like these have a loooooooooooong history of not working in real life patients and sometimes even killing them) and it will take many several hundred millions of dollars to find out with any certainty. This means that your "generic" drug companies will have to invest lots of money and, even then, their investments may all be for naught. The "generic" drug company would be stupid to pay for it because even if they prove the drug works, other companies could come in very quickly and sell it at its actual marginal cost (way below the price they could recoup R&D on) or doctors will simply prescribe the existing compound to patients (presuming this drug requires no modification).
How much do you want to bet that you never hear about this drug as a cure for cancer several years from now?
Re:freaking me out
on
Who won?
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· Score: 1, Informative
Bush was appointed in 2000 by the supreme court with after a contested ballot in a state his brother runs. He is the son of the former head of the cia.
The NYTimes disagreed. The votes Gore actually asked to have recounted under the rules he asked for would not have won the election for him. Now there were disputes that, maybe, if all of Florida was recounted (contrary to Gore's limited request) Gore _might_ have won by a hundred votes or so... but it all depends on the methodologies (Bush would have won with others). Such a hand count would have taken a long time and would been very much disputable (there is uniform standard to count bad votes). The Supreme Court did the country a favor by stepping in when it did even if it took a lot of flack for it.
No-one disputes the fact that Gore got more vote in the country as a whole. So don't give me this "America voted Bush in" crap.
Firstly, we don't have a popular vote. Simply adding up each states votes is not the same thing. Bush, Gore, and every serious presidential contender since has spent their time and their dollars according to the electoral college system. Bush spent damn little time appealing to voters in highly populous states like CA, NJ, etc because it was a foregone conclusion that he was going to lose those states. If it were a popular vote system, then he would have been well advised to spend time in more populuous states. Likewise, many Republican-leaning voters in those states may well have chosen to stay home since they couldn't sway the presidential election.
Secondly, the difference in the sum of the voters was approximately 540K votes or a mere ~.19% of the entire nation. This is hardly reflects a real nationwide preference for Gore given the circumstances.
Thirdly, fun fact: Bush got about 6M more votes in 2000 than Clinton got in 1992. Does that make Clinton illegitimate in your view?
Lastly, please keep on re-fighting 2000 - it's a winning strategy:-)
Information that has no costs and no barriers to use, gets used more.
Wrong. I never disputed that something that is free will typically get used more. I actually acknowledged the point a week ago in my opening statement: "I wasn't disputing that restrictions or lack thereof can impact its usage (scale and style)". That being said, all things are typically not equal when you eliminate barriers and make something free. The ability of the creators to generate revenue has very real impacts on the quality and quantity of what is produced. With this same logic, we could set the price for food to zero. More people would eat the available food supply (there would be much less spoilage). Few would dispute this, but no one would deny that production would drastically decline as a result and that there would be less net benefit over the long run.
You might argue that a different model is possible, which generates sufficient revenues for production/development in all the important areas while still allowing it to be open and free. You have utterly failed to make this case and, empirically speaking, this simply has not happened.
Open information models have the potential to be more accurate that traditional proprietary ones.
I don't agree with this. Openness might create more opportunity for people with information to the contrary to chime in, but correctness is not often the result. The information presented in an open environment may tend to agree more often with the opinions of its readership (than closed alternatives), but that's not the same thing as actually being correct. Slashdot is rather "open", yet the editors repeatedly publish factually wrong articles and its readers promote misinformed posts regularly. Regardless of my opinion, there is nothing to stop you and like-minded people from establishing an "open" news organization and attempting to compete against the mainstream news.
Restrictions on information negatively impacts decision making capabilities in business.
Philosophically, yes, but in practice it does not make a huge impact, especially when you're talking about access to mainstream journalism. Restrictions on pricing negatively impacts the ability for useful information to be generated. You have to balance them. The balance, i.e., price & accessibility, is generally pretty good as there is not much key information that decent firms cannot readily find or pay for if they really need it.
I then went on to say this was analogous to software and that your arguments were weak - specifically, I questioned that free-software has been out-competed, your metrics and your assertion of the proprietary software model is better by pointing out that proprietary software benefits from the ideas of the free-software community - if not from the code base.
You've presented nothing that would contradict open source's general lack of usage. ~25% server market share. ~7% browser market share. ~2% desktop market share. ~70% http server market share. ~47% for MTA software. A few percent for PHP&MySQL. This is very nearly the extent of open source's success. The closed source market is much larger than this (especially once you leave the server market). I never said that open source has or will have zero success, so you're really missing the point by repeatedly bringing up that open source has made some inroads (particularly when you ignore the types and methods of its success).
You also never presented an argument for idea borrowing, never mind code, outside of IE supposedly stealing ideas from Firefox. Please.
A suggestion: start with the supposition that you might not have understood something correctly rat
The trouble is that careers men tend to select (like engineering) generally pay more than careers women select (like teaching.) I'm a computer engineer and my wife is an elementary school teacher. She has a year more education than I and gets payed 40% of what I make. That's typical of "male" and "female" jobs.
So in once sense, you're right...we shouldn't try to force people to take careers in equal numbers...but this definitely does NOT mean that everything is peaching keen in the treatment of sex by the workplace.
I disagree. Women represent more than 50% of law school classes and very nearly the same in medical scools (higher at some schools -- most have higher percentage of women applications too): two high paying jobs (medicine less so these days). Many adult women may eventually choose career-paths that are less demanding timewise so that they can spend more time with their families, but I don't think that highly capable women are systematically choosing career paths with lower pay for its own sake or that those women are receiving lesser pay merely because they're women.
With respect to teacher pay, I think you have several things going on here:
1) Education majors aren't terribly bright on average (SAT, GMATs, IQ, and other tests consistently rank them amongst the lowest of the majors) and have low admissions requirements.
2) It's a fairly attractive job because their schedules are typically relatively short, very predictable, and provide quite a bit of time off.
3) Many districts have unions which eliminate the ability for bright young faculty to get paid according to their skills by mandating pay based on seniority and "credentials" (which often don't map to real intelligence, ability, or even knowledge).
4) Supply and demand. There are a lot people that don't jobs that offer schedules like teaching. Teaching is very easy to get into relative to the number of positions to fill. In addition, most people in teaching can't readily walk into higher paying positions in other industries (due to lack of relevant training/experience) so there isn't a lot of upwards pressure in salaries internally.
5) The spread of required skills is fairly wide. It takes a lot less intelligence and skill to teach a 4th grade social studies class than 12 grade AP calculus course. Most intelligent people would burn out quickly in this kind of job after a few years... so there needs to be some recognition of this fact when looking at pay scales.
6) Many states/districts artificially limit the pool of qualified applications by requiring teaching certifications (or other burdensome "alternative" requirements) which further depresses pay at the upper end. There are a lot of smart people with advanced degrees in hard sciences that would love to teach for a few years, but they can't without first spending a ton of time jumping through hoops.
Now, before you flame me, I know there are some highly educated and highly capable teachers out there (your wife may well be one of them) that work hard, but the public school system is by and large horribly mismanaged when it comes to HR, staffing and other issues.
You're wrong about that. Speaking as a type 1 diabetic, I can tell you that anyone with diabetes would have enough training and warnings from their own doctor that they wouldn't enter such a competition, and anyone who *didn't* know they had diabetes would be able to handle it. And furthermore, high blood sugar causes obvious, call-a-doctor-NOW symptoms long before it becomes life threatening. Switching to gatorade would have made the competition safe.
Speaking as someone that has worked with many hundreds diabetics and clinicians, I can tell you that a very significant number IDDMs have a very poor idea of the amount of sugar/carbs in the food they eat regularly even. This is particularly true in extreme circumstances (like trying to drink as much of something as possible) and tends to be aggrivated by reduced mental capacity as BG levels rise. Not all diabetics have good and attentive doctors (esp. GPs) & educators and not all diabetics are responsible (or have responsible parents). I've literally met some IDDMs that think nothing of drinking several liters of coke a day even after very serious incidents (admittedly most of these were poor/uneducated). That roughly 1800 diabetics die of diagnosed DKA each year in the US alone suggests that many are not as well educated or as well disciplined as you would like to believe. Many more may also place themselves in harms-way as a direct result of being hyperglycemic (e.g., car crash) and thus not be diagnosed accordingly.
Furthermore, even if the person appreciates the risk to some degree, they may over-compensate with insulin (esp. pump users... causing hypoglycemia) or even under-compensate (their pump, for instance, can occlude without their being aware of it).
Of course it can. Putting allofmp3.com aside for the moment, there is no legal source of non-DRM music aside from CD. Many CDs have DRM mechanisms on them these days, so even that source is not free. Microsoft and Apple will both be mandating DRM in short order, and both already do so when it comes to most types of media.
Sigh. The fact that many artists/copyright owners choose not to licence their content in DRM-free formats is a totally different debate than the discussion over one vendor's ability to use network effects to sustain an actual monopoly. It is within the legal right of the individual artists/copyright holders unless the legislature or the courts say otherwise. What's more, you can find legal music in non-DRM formats where the copyright holders have actually blessed it. If you're an Indie artist, there is nothing to stop you from offering your music for free or for a fee (without DRM) today.
Theorizing that "the man" will somehow force all music to be encumbered with DRM, against the wishes of its creators, is nothing more than wild speculation (not to mention that it is very unlikely).
then I hope you're not planning to use word, which has problems when opening documents from substantially older versions of word, and whose documents are not backwards-compatible.
What is your point? I said this is a monopoly, i.e., it's not a good situation. I use Word regularly and I certainly have plenty of complaints about the price and some of its bugginess (particularly in the past... although compared to Open Office and others its still heads and shoulders better), but I've had very few problems with forward compatibility.
Now I know you're a shill. There is NOTHING stopping you from developing non-GPL software for Linux or other FOSS. Many corporations, including say Adobe are already managing to do this. You are a FUD-spreader. Now that I know you are scum, the rest of this comment will probably be a lot more fun.
I'm no shill. This is also an ad hominem attack. First, porting your code to any wholly new platform/SDK/APK/etc creates very real hurdles. Second, I assert that Linux does create high hurdles for proprietary developers relative to other platforms (e.g., MacOS X). The lack of high quality application development tools and the GPL licenses of many important libraries create very real problems for proprietary developers. QT, for instance, is licensed under GPL v2. Developers that link to it must either GPL their code or pay TrollTech money for their dual-license (which would allow them the chance to actually sell more than 1 copy of the application). Third, the proprietary developer also must contend with the "everything must be free" mentality of a significant percentage of Linux users so they have a reduced incentive to port. You can't exactly claim that there's a lot of proprietary applications available for Linux or that there are a lot of superior quality Linux applications.
But we're not really talking about a monopoly here, we're talking ubiquity. Some media simply can not be gotten without DRM, and that DRM is there specifically to prevent you from exercising fair use rights, to stop you from format-shifting, and the like. They don't just want to entice you to buy the white album again, they want to force you.
The artist is not obligated to give you what you want. The artist isn't obligated to record music, why should they be obliged to provide it to you on your terms? Vote with your feet if you don't like it. Besides, most content is still available without any DRM on CDs.
If it's so damn easy to crack DRM, what's your problem? You're on slashdot, right, this is supposed to be easy for you.
Yes, the musician can decide that they want less exposure, that's true. What a choice!
Yeah, and Microsoft doesn't have a literal monopoly, they have a virtual monopoly, whereas you're not literally forced to buy DRM, you're virtually forced to. Microsoft and Apple are both staunch DRM supporters and between them they hold nearly the entire market.
Nonsense. The comparison between Microsoft's monopoly on Windows and Office are very different than your choice to buy DRM music or not. Microsoft enjoys undeniable network effects which sustain their monopoly powers. The same cannot really be said for DRM technology or music.
If you ever find yourself needing to share documents with the 99% of other word processing/spreadsheet users (Office users), then you really need a program that can reliably share changes back and forth without losing formating or data constantly.
If you ever find yourself needing to run popular applications, most of those applications will be written exclusively for Windows, then you really need to run Windows (even if virtually) to run those programs. It is very difficult for the developers of these programs to provide compatible versions for alternative operating systems (especially those like Linux which encumber them with GPL issues).
Contrast this with the situation with music. The musician/label can readily choose to convert their content to as many alternative technologies as they like (be they other DRM technology or non-DRM technology). These labels have, in fact, done precisely this with other DRM technologies (Rhapsody, Napster, Windows Media, etc). You, the user, also have the ability to select the technology and DRM regime most appropriate for yourself. Even if some particular artist is not available in some system, the copyright owners could have done it without substantial cost if they wanted to and you can always select another artist.
Now you might argue that a particular set of users might become locked into a particular vendor if they make a substantial investment in any one vendor's music format, but this does not automatically grant Apple monopoly powers anymore than it grants Gilette's a monopoly mere because you bought a Gilette Mach 3 razor (and so presumably need to keep on purchasing gillete blades).
When and if Apple reaches such a point that there are no other real alternatives, when most users have some a large investment in iTunes Music that they would not even consider anything else, then maybe, just maybe, the courts might compel Apple to share their DRM technology to foster competition within that space. However, I think this is unlikely to happen in the near future because:
1) DRM is difficult to ossify into a multi-vendor standard. Its very strength lies in its proprietariness and in its ability to constantly change as new threats emerge. (Perhaps in binary/online/non-source form...)
2) The distribution is digital, i.e., no need to worry about physical inventory costs, and the digital players can so readily accomodate many different formats.
3) Because the labels and most non-pragmatic successful musicians are simply unwilling to place the bulk of their most popular music in a weak or unprotected format.
My point of view is that DRM and P2P-like battles are inevitable. We can't simultaneously have unrestricted sharing of files across the internet, facilitate completely open file formats that can be shared instantly and anonymously, and a system that encourages the recording of music in the future. The artists and the labels aren't stupid (contrary to slashdot's popular opinion) They know and appreciate this fact. Your political capital would be far better spent lobbying for more flexible and more compatible DRM than against DRM itself.
If Solaris goes with GPL3 and Linux stays with GPL2 (for DRM and other reasons) it will mean that Linux code can be added to Solaris, but Solaris code can't be added to Linux. Surely this is a disadvantage for Linux?
I don't typically dip my toes into these impossible GPL debates, but I'm quite certain that Linux is GPL v2 ONLY (until all its copyright holders agree to license under GPL v3--which I don't think is going to happen). This means that any derivative works based on Linux's GPL v2 only kernel code, must also be licensed under GPL v2 -- which means it's simply incompatible with any GPL v3 project if that work can be said to be derivative (certainly most kernel code).
The "disadvantage" applies to the entire GPL community, both GPL v2 and GPL v3 supporters. Too bad Stallman places his idealistic whims above the more practical concerns of its developers and its users. I think either one of two things is going to happen: either a large number of projects adopt GPL v3 and stay with it thereby dramatically splinting the open source movement for the worse OR Stallman loses much of his credibility and those few developers that do adopt GPL v3 revert back to GPL v2 ONLY.
That you for confirming that you are indeed a populist asshole with an attitude that reeks of ignorance.
I wasn't completely sure before, but now there's no doubt.
Oh, I'm sorry, did you actually think your "real knowledge and experience" with patents makes your opinion worth more than that of anyone else?
At bare minimum my knowledge and experience with patents suggests that the facts that I present are about 100x more likely to be true than your own. In point of fact you were wildly incorrect about a very fundamental aspect of patent law. This also suggests that you have never made a concerted attempt read and understand virtually any of the patents that slashdot has whined about. If you had you would realize that your understanding was fundamentally incorrect since the vast majority of patents with misinterpretation of patent law would either be impossible to violate (since the seperate claims are often mutually exclusive and it would be impractical to violate them all in any one product) or that those few remaining patents would be impossible to violate or at least trivial to work around (since each additional claim would create a patent of very narrow scope)
For instance, if you had actually read Alan Cox's "DRM" patent would know that claims 1 and 7 would cancel each other out (with your "all elements" interpretation of patents).
Alternatively, if you had actually read the much whined about Amazon "1-click" patent you would know that, at the very least, any website could trivially work around Amazon's patent by simply not employing "speaking of a sound" (accepting the user's voice input) to trigger the 1-click action (claim #1). Not to mention that the patent would be impossible to violate because claim #3 (clicking a button) and claim #4 (accepting voice input) are mutually exclusive (with your flawed understanding).
My opinions about the overall value of IP are also far more likely to be worthwhile since they are guided by actual experience and knowledge instead of slashdot's typical group-think, FUD, and scaremongering.
Sorry kid, you still get just one vote, like every other Joe Sixpack.
Presuming you're actually old enough to vote, we both just have one vote, but my vote will be a whole hell of a lot more informed than your own. And while you're entitled to your own vote and own opinion, you're not entitled to your own set of facts.
You know, the first part of your post might deserve a +5 informative because you happen to know of some website dealing with law
Unlike the vast majority of people on slashdot (especially those whining loudest about patents), I actually have real knowledge and experience with them (though I would not hold myself out as a patent expert). I've filed several patents (for my own business and a previous employer) and my wife is a laywer & is admitted to the patent bar. I simply cited the website to end the silly debate.
Some of us actually do bother to read the linked article (and sometimes even a few more articles on the same subject, if they exist).
Your assertion was simply wrong so there was no reason for me to read through a bunch of sophomoric rants on slashdot. If you still think the "article" illustrated something relevant to this debate, then please tell us exactly what it was.
Biden is from Delaware where most large corporations are headquartered. Feinstein is from California, Lindsey Grahama and Lamar are well known freakamazoid. Check out who donates to these clowns and see if this isn't exactly what you'd expect!
WTF
1) Most US corporations are merely incorporated in Delaware -- not headquartered there. Big difference.
3) This bill actually seems pretty reasonable to me. It's basically just putting internet/satellite radio stations on the same fee structure (if you want to use copyright law to broadcast someone else's music) as FM/AM radio and insists that you don't allow consumers to willy-nilly record everything (time shifting is still allowed). What gives... besides the usual "everything should be free" mentality?
Or you know, maybe they could have used gatoraide instead of water. Simple enough change for them and would be totally safe.
No, not totally safe. Too much gatorade (high sugar content) can kill insulin-dependent diabetics too. In fact, I'd argue that that change would be statistically more likely to cause deaths and serious injury in this type of competition.
No, actually, your product or process does have to show all the elements listed in the patent.
No, it does not. The product/process must contain all the elements of just one claim: not all the elements of all the claims. There is a huge difference between the two. If this were really the case, it would be impossible to violate the majority of patents as they contain dependent claims that are mutually exclusive (often the dependent claims describe various implementations of the same idea).
Something infringes a patent if it has all the elements of a claim in the patent, or performs all the steps of a claim. It does not have to match all the claims, a single one will do. However, it is important that it matches all elements in that single claim. Most patent courts take this requirement quite strictly and will not easily ignore an element in a claim unless it is clearly irrelevant. One often-heard argument against ignoring an element is that patent writers are aware of the strict interpretation and so would not put in an element unless necessary. Therefore, an element that is present in the claim must have been deemed necessary and so may not be ignored.
One great example is that lawsuit against Nintendo http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/08/ 2138250 over the Wiimote, because it has a "trigger" button underneath. And coincidently, the Wiimote also has buttons on top just like the item that Nintendo is supposedly infringing on.
I didn't read this case, but citing slashdot on patent issues is like citing Soviet propaganda to find out about the US Constitution. It is just about the worst place to find reliable information on patents.
Slashdot Mirror
What you totally neglect is that this is most definitely not simply "encryption". We're not worried about interlopers/men in the middle, so much as what happens, at the recipient's computer both with the decryption keys and with the resulting decrypted data stream. Only someone that is fundamentally ignorant of underlying technology would believe Apple would be better off if they disclosed their specifications/code for all to see. Any idiot that knows jack about programming could trivially alter the code to save the keys to make it accessible to other applications or simply dump out the data in its unencrypted format.
Even if Apple theoretically employed a non-optimal encryption algorithm or implemented it poorly that issue is very small in practice. If cracking the encryption only takes more than a few hours most consumers aren't going to bother and, in all likelyhood, it would be much longer than this (unless you assume Apple can't afford to hire programmers that are able to deploy well understood algorithms effectively).
As for DVD John et. al, I fully recognize that their DRM and, in fact, _any_ DRM running on untrusted hardware is going to be broken eventually -- it is inevitable. That is a huge part of my point why Apple simply cannot afford to ossify DRM into some standard OR openly share the algorithms/keys (many vendors may choose to leak it to hurt Apple). DRM vendors like Apple need to keep it both OBSCURE and MOVING TARGET in order for it to be good enough to keep the majority of consumers from cracking it en masse. Openly sharing their design/code with a bunch of different vendors would hurt the effective security on both counts.
FairPlay took awhile to come out. It worked for awhile, then stopped working several times between versions...and then stopped working entirely. The average user could hardly keep up. There was a LONG period where there weren't any cracks available and the ones that exist now only work in REAL TIME and, even then, they lose all the metadata and such...and it will likely be broken again, long before most people
Wrong. I acknowledged that this system benefits Apple, this however does not mean that they don't have any valid reasons for keeping it to themselves either. You may disagree that Apple openly sharing their specification wouldn't hurt the integrity of the system, but you obviously don't understand the situation.
As for the labels, they have a lot more leverage than you acknowledge. They can simply choose not to sell to Apple anymore if they're all that unhappy with it. They can and do sell their music through Microsoft and other vendors too.
As I said before, it is you who fails to understand the issue. As to the "strawman", you obviously have no idea what the f*** that even means. I am directly critizing their regulation. You may disagree, but it's only a strawman argument if I put words/arguments in their mouth. While you're at it, you may want to look up ad hominem as this is precisely what you're attempting.
Yes, DRM is a pain sometimes (primarily because I have to use iTunes or an Ipod to play ITMS music). It would be nice to be able to play this stuff on my SONOS music system directly and other players....
Yes, I'm sure Apple benefits as a result of its lock-in.
However, I also suspect that it is unlikely that Apple could securely share (without people leaking) the specifications with a half-dozen different manufacturers and also keep all those different software/devices in sync with the latest DRM state (so that they could stay one-step ahead of the crackers... at least as far as the average user is concerned). The only way I see this working is if Apple could distribute binary/objects and mandate a framework for internet auto-update across all the platforms...even then I think it's a stretch.
Yes, I know some of you anti-IP people couldn't give a damn about the rights of the industry to protect its own property from illegal distribution, but this voter couldn't disagree more strongly. I'd rather face the lock-in with Apple (which, imho, still has a very good and product overall) than risk losing an effective DRM system entirely. It's possible that various copyright owners may survive without DRM, but I'd rather preserve the option (which requires avoiding hamhanded government regulation) and allow things to evolve before contemplating regulation like this.
It has its flaws, but yes. On the whole I'd rather be here than anywhere else.
You can mark me -5 TROLL now.
Disagreeing with Slashdot Dogma:
pro-DRM (-1)
pro-IP (-1)
pro-US (-1)
pro-mainstream platform (-1)
anti- "consumer" (-1)
Well I used to feel much the same way: I abstained from buying any of the earlier ebook readers and would never ever even consider really trying to read anything on a PDA/laptop/etc, but the new eInk devices work pretty well. I've got the new Sony eBook Reader and I'm quite happy with it. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not ready to throw out books just yet (and I read at least 2 books a week on average), but it's definitely getting close. I'd give it another few more years to start gaining real mainstream traction.
... only not quite as slick).
Legibility is perfectly good, imho, comparable to a decent paperback. I've read about 20 novels on this thing since I purchased it and I haven't had any problems.
What it's lacking right now is:
1) Equally good online selection & equivalent prices (though improved since Nov?) -- there is a small premium on most things (esp. considering I can't readily share it with friends/family), though frankly I don't mind it that much (being able to get what I want now is kinda nice... kind of like iTunes is to Ipod
2) Better firmware. Stupid quirks, which are perfectly fixable, exist in the software. For instance, if I walk away from the book and brush it against something, it'll cause the pages to skip forwards or backwards by some large number... there's no easy way to simply return to where I left off unless I vigilently bookmarked every several pages as I read (and this compounded by 2 second refresh time for flipping through--doesn't matter when you read, but it does when you want to flip through something quickly). A few lines of code could fix this #$@$
3) Some small form factor changes. The buttons are in kind of a wierd place.
4) Battery life could use some improvement. I may be alone in this, but I've only been able to get 2-3 novels per charge or about 1.5K pages. This is about 1/2 or 1/3 the number they quoted. Not a show stopper, but it'd help its long term ability to replace books.
5) An integrated backlight/frontlight would be nice... a real advantage over paperbacks, though I guess Sony chose not to for marketing reasons.
Overall, I find it's very nice to have though. I do like not having to carry several books with me when I travel (especially hardbacks -- I'd PAY the same price softback just for the privledge of not having to deal with them). I often find myself needing to carry more than 4 books and even that is a pain for me since I like to travel light (avoid checking bags in almost all of my trips). It's also nice being able to copy text files, PDFs and such to it for review. I don't often find myself wanting to read stuff that is in the public domain stuff, but it could save you real money if you do. This is where I see eBooks really gaining a foothold in the short run -- applications where commercial printed books simply aren't available (e.g, more nice/obscure works, personal papers, public domain stuff, etc). I also envision niche markets sprouting up precisely because of this technolog
Furthermore, as to the ability to sustain this model with automated scripts... I doubt it. I think sure they're looking for OTC stocks that are both stable (not falling... so they don't screw themselves) and on the uptick (so their suckers don't see it and freak out). They also need some kind of story that they can sell.... given the relatively small number of OTC stocks out there (just a few thousand), I think the opportunities are actually quite narrow.
In other words, the market for these schemes only exists for a small number of small-time (low-fund) spammers. This is probably why these schemes aren't over-running our mailboxes today. I mean they're a nuisance, but we don't see hundreds of seperate schemes a day or anything approaching that.
Of course, if these spammers average one of these scams per week (@~5% return/scam) and re-invest all of their funds in each successive scam, that theoretically adds up to roughly 1200% return/year
It'd probably just be far more effective to detect these spams and warn the suckers before they trade. In other words, design a system with postini and other anti-spam mechanisms to aggregate these type of spams, parse them, and ***WARN*** the potential buyers (suckers) through etrade and other electronic intermediares (that the unsophisticated buyers are likely using) that they're about to buy a stock that is almost certainly being manipulated (with more than just the typical legalese one sees these days)...
Regardless of the word you want to apply to it, you need a credible alternative.
First, there is a huge difference between installing/servicing basic (non-novel) utilities and inventing/creating intellectual goods like software, newspapers, novels, music, reference books, magazines, etc. Relying on the government to create or subsidize the production of these works means that we depend on government to determine the "right" value for each thing and know what is or is not feasible. In other words, you propose that we centrally plan intellectual works and this sort of thing has failed time and time again. There are times when government actions, subsidy, or even monopoly/regulation are the only reasonable answer, but it should be a last resort.
Second, government spending is not "free", nor is the burden equally shared under our existing tax system. Most of us can agree that we need national freeways in general, but not many of us are going to agree that we need to subsidize, say, the latest work from Tom Clancy, let alone works from highly divisive figures like Noam Chomsky or Pat Buchanan. (Not to mention the fact that the government couldn't fund anything directly touching/commenting on religion) I find it ironic that someone could object morally to charging the actual consumer for the right to consume a work, but has no problem forcing someone else to foot the bill for that same action(especially those who have the nerve to be most productive) -- in my opinion the former (copyright) is far more just than the latter (much higher taxes for non-uniformally appreciated non-essentials).
Third, electricity, telephone service, rail roads, and other critical utilities were all largely installed wholly by private industry. Regulation and government-granted monopolies came later. It should be noted that government's role in actually subsidizing most of these works is very much the exception (rural areas, certain counties, etc). As for the postal service, you should note that this is not only government corporation, but a nationwide monopoly: with the exception for so-called "urgent" messages (where they've been thorougly trounced), no one is allowed to compete with them.
You aren't even beginning to approach 10% and if you want to convince anyone, you're going to have to do a lot better.
Some people may try to infringe, but copyright has effectively stopped the most aggregious facilitators of it (esp. Napster). We also have DRM, various copy protection mechanisms, etc. What consumers before could simply copy they now have to constantly scour the net for the latest tools to facilitate it. You think that if copyright crumbles and DRM and similar mechanisms crumble we'll have a bunch of stuff in the public dom
The fact remains that there was no legally acceptable standard by which they could reliably divine the intent of the voter. Furthermore, if you're truly going to talk about what "the people of Florida" intended and excuse voting mistakes, then you should also acknowledge that there is a very good chance the the media swayed the election by calling the state for Gore an hour before the polls were closed in the heavily Republican leaning panhandle. We have no idea how many Republican voters chose not to vote as a result. This could easily have swayed the election far in excess of any actual botched votes for Gore.
Most of those "structural" issues that were truly biased against Gore were in Palm Beach, a county that is heavily managed by Democrats and for Democrats. They changed the ballot. What's more, it's extremely rare for Presidential elections to be so close that such a mistake could even potentially sway the election. The other issues that seemed to work against Gore had little to do with the system and everything to do with the voter (not being able to read, follow directions, or understand election law).
I disagree. Although I'm all for making reasonable changes to the voting system to eliminate errors, even those flawed systems would rarely shape an election outcome and even if they did it would be very difficult to claim that there was a clear voter preference. There's a certain amount of luck and chance involved when you get to these margins. In any event, my biggest objection was to the over-reaction of election officials/voting republic.... "Oh No, We can't use paper! Let's go digital"... and completely ignore all the flaws.
We're never going to have a 100% accurate/fair voting system and people need to be adult about it when we have outcomes that get that close (within the margin of error). I'd far rather reduce the election when it gets that close to a coin toss than drag the country through it multiple recounts, court battles, etc.
I'll grant you that there are important differences between physical goods and intellectual goods, but that does not let you off the hook with respect to the actual production of intellectual goods (both towards the covering of R&D costs and as incentive to take that risk). The "details", as you call them, are fundamental to the entire pursuit.
That depends on your position. If you're merely advocating that we let people try alternative model_X, I certainly won't stop you (even if I suspect that said system will fail in most cases). If you're saying, let's scrap the entire system of copyright, then I submit that you need, at bare minimum, a credible and convincing alternative for most of the goods which we value and a credible reason why we should be forced to abandon IP. In addition, if the alternative is allegedly better and can operate concurrently with copyright, the system should simply be employed side-by-side.
I'm happy that other people are trying different systems even if I don't think they're very good or likely to scale. Under our current system we can support these alternatives. Though I would point out that that site is claiming copyright authority to prevent "commercial republication" -- which would rule out your meta-newservices and open access.
I'd say large organizations are particularly afflicted with this, but it has much less to do with lack of the availability of the resource (available information). It's a matter of apathy, inertia, risk-aversion, etc. In other words, it's a matter of wanting to spend the time to intelligently use the resource and then apply it. Even if all the news is bundled up in one place for free, it's never going to be pre-digested into little soundbytes that are directly relevant to the particular organization. Someone has to interpret the information and apply it meaningfully. Even with the meaningful information, someone has to be willing and able to act (which tends to be the biggest problem).
I'd say success is both consumer adoption and having an all-around high quality product that your target audience would actually want to use (which adoption over the long run tends to correlate well with). People are a lot smarter than they're often made out to be on forums like slashdot, at least, when it comes to issues they can tangibly appreciate. There may be some lag time, but if a product is truly equal or better while costing a fraction as much, then there's really no way it's going to continue to lose unless there are huge network effects or transition costs th
First, drug companies have a huge incentive to rush a drug to market once they believe it is safe and effective. They've invested hundreds of millions of dollars -- they're not going to delay their ability to reap the profits unnecessarily. Even if you assume it wouldn't impact their patent life on market, the shareholders and management are highly motivated to make it happen ASAP.
Second, the patent duration is relatively fixed in practice and they maximize their time on market with patent protection by getting it there more quickly. The absolute most they can gain is 5 years for the testing and regulatory review process, but no more than 14 years post-approval, and the FDA reduces time spent in testing (non-agency review) by half. So if they drag a clinical trial out for 2 years longer than necessary, they'd lose 1 year effectively. Most drugs have less 10 years on market before the patent expires.
Third, drug companies can't make "too much" money for shareholders. They want to maximize their investment. If they've identified a drug that might worthwhile, they're going to patent it ASAP to prevent their competitors from beating them to the punch. Once they've done that the clock starts counting against them and they would be stupid to sit around on something that they have good cause to believe would work.
There is a very real chance that the drug won't work (cancer and diabetes discoveries like these have a loooooooooooong history of not working in real life patients and sometimes even killing them) and it will take many several hundred millions of dollars to find out with any certainty. This means that your "generic" drug companies will have to invest lots of money and, even then, their investments may all be for naught. The "generic" drug company would be stupid to pay for it because even if they prove the drug works, other companies could come in very quickly and sell it at its actual marginal cost (way below the price they could recoup R&D on) or doctors will simply prescribe the existing compound to patients (presuming this drug requires no modification).
How much do you want to bet that you never hear about this drug as a cure for cancer several years from now?
Firstly, we don't have a popular vote. Simply adding up each states votes is not the same thing. Bush, Gore, and every serious presidential contender since has spent their time and their dollars according to the electoral college system. Bush spent damn little time appealing to voters in highly populous states like CA, NJ, etc because it was a foregone conclusion that he was going to lose those states. If it were a popular vote system, then he would have been well advised to spend time in more populuous states. Likewise, many Republican-leaning voters in those states may well have chosen to stay home since they couldn't sway the presidential election.
Secondly, the difference in the sum of the voters was approximately 540K votes or a mere ~.19% of the entire nation. This is hardly reflects a real nationwide preference for Gore given the circumstances.
Thirdly, fun fact: Bush got about 6M more votes in 2000 than Clinton got in 1992. Does that make Clinton illegitimate in your view?
Lastly, please keep on re-fighting 2000 - it's a winning strategy
Wrong. I never disputed that something that is free will typically get used more. I actually acknowledged the point a week ago in my opening statement: "I wasn't disputing that restrictions or lack thereof can impact its usage (scale and style)". That being said, all things are typically not equal when you eliminate barriers and make something free. The ability of the creators to generate revenue has very real impacts on the quality and quantity of what is produced. With this same logic, we could set the price for food to zero. More people would eat the available food supply (there would be much less spoilage). Few would dispute this, but no one would deny that production would drastically decline as a result and that there would be less net benefit over the long run.
You might argue that a different model is possible, which generates sufficient revenues for production/development in all the important areas while still allowing it to be open and free. You have utterly failed to make this case and, empirically speaking, this simply has not happened.
I don't agree with this. Openness might create more opportunity for people with information to the contrary to chime in, but correctness is not often the result. The information presented in an open environment may tend to agree more often with the opinions of its readership (than closed alternatives), but that's not the same thing as actually being correct. Slashdot is rather "open", yet the editors repeatedly publish factually wrong articles and its readers promote misinformed posts regularly. Regardless of my opinion, there is nothing to stop you and like-minded people from establishing an "open" news organization and attempting to compete against the mainstream news.
Philosophically, yes, but in practice it does not make a huge impact, especially when you're talking about access to mainstream journalism. Restrictions on pricing negatively impacts the ability for useful information to be generated. You have to balance them. The balance, i.e., price & accessibility, is generally pretty good as there is not much key information that decent firms cannot readily find or pay for if they really need it.
You've presented nothing that would contradict open source's general lack of usage. ~25% server market share. ~7% browser market share. ~2% desktop market share. ~70% http server market share. ~47% for MTA software. A few percent for PHP&MySQL. This is very nearly the extent of open source's success. The closed source market is much larger than this (especially once you leave the server market). I never said that open source has or will have zero success, so you're really missing the point by repeatedly bringing up that open source has made some inroads (particularly when you ignore the types and methods of its success).
You also never presented an argument for idea borrowing, never mind code, outside of IE supposedly stealing ideas from Firefox. Please.
With respect to teacher pay, I think you have several things going on here:
1) Education majors aren't terribly bright on average (SAT, GMATs, IQ, and other tests consistently rank them amongst the lowest of the majors) and have low admissions requirements.
2) It's a fairly attractive job because their schedules are typically relatively short, very predictable, and provide quite a bit of time off.
3) Many districts have unions which eliminate the ability for bright young faculty to get paid according to their skills by mandating pay based on seniority and "credentials" (which often don't map to real intelligence, ability, or even knowledge).
4) Supply and demand. There are a lot people that don't jobs that offer schedules like teaching. Teaching is very easy to get into relative to the number of positions to fill. In addition, most people in teaching can't readily walk into higher paying positions in other industries (due to lack of relevant training/experience) so there isn't a lot of upwards pressure in salaries internally.
5) The spread of required skills is fairly wide. It takes a lot less intelligence and skill to teach a 4th grade social studies class than 12 grade AP calculus course. Most intelligent people would burn out quickly in this kind of job after a few years... so there needs to be some recognition of this fact when looking at pay scales.
6) Many states/districts artificially limit the pool of qualified applications by requiring teaching certifications (or other burdensome "alternative" requirements) which further depresses pay at the upper end. There are a lot of smart people with advanced degrees in hard sciences that would love to teach for a few years, but they can't without first spending a ton of time jumping through hoops.
Now, before you flame me, I know there are some highly educated and highly capable teachers out there (your wife may well be one of them) that work hard, but the public school system is by and large horribly mismanaged when it comes to HR, staffing and other issues.
Furthermore, even if the person appreciates the risk to some degree, they may over-compensate with insulin (esp. pump users... causing hypoglycemia) or even under-compensate (their pump, for instance, can occlude without their being aware of it).
Sigh. The fact that many artists/copyright owners choose not to licence their content in DRM-free formats is a totally different debate than the discussion over one vendor's ability to use network effects to sustain an actual monopoly. It is within the legal right of the individual artists/copyright holders unless the legislature or the courts say otherwise. What's more, you can find legal music in non-DRM formats where the copyright holders have actually blessed it. If you're an Indie artist, there is nothing to stop you from offering your music for free or for a fee (without DRM) today.
Theorizing that "the man" will somehow force all music to be encumbered with DRM, against the wishes of its creators, is nothing more than wild speculation (not to mention that it is very unlikely).
What is your point? I said this is a monopoly, i.e., it's not a good situation. I use Word regularly and I certainly have plenty of complaints about the price and some of its bugginess (particularly in the past... although compared to Open Office and others its still heads and shoulders better), but I've had very few problems with forward compatibility.
I'm no shill. This is also an ad hominem attack. First, porting your code to any wholly new platform/SDK/APK/etc creates very real hurdles. Second, I assert that Linux does create high hurdles for proprietary developers relative to other platforms (e.g., MacOS X). The lack of high quality application development tools and the GPL licenses of many important libraries create very real problems for proprietary developers. QT, for instance, is licensed under GPL v2. Developers that link to it must either GPL their code or pay TrollTech money for their dual-license (which would allow them the chance to actually sell more than 1 copy of the application). Third, the proprietary developer also must contend with the "everything must be free" mentality of a significant percentage of Linux users so they have a reduced incentive to port. You can't exactly claim that there's a lot of proprietary applications available for Linux or that there are a lot of superior quality Linux applications.
The artist is not obligated to give you what you want. The artist isn't obligated to record music, why should they be obliged to provide it to you on your terms? Vote with your feet if you don't like it. Besides, most content is still available without any DRM on CDs.
If it's so damn easy to crack DRM, what's your problem? You're on slashdot, right, this is supposed to be easy for you.
If you ever find yourself needing to share documents with the 99% of other word processing/spreadsheet users (Office users), then you really need a program that can reliably share changes back and forth without losing formating or data constantly.
If you ever find yourself needing to run popular applications, most of those applications will be written exclusively for Windows, then you really need to run Windows (even if virtually) to run those programs. It is very difficult for the developers of these programs to provide compatible versions for alternative operating systems (especially those like Linux which encumber them with GPL issues).
Contrast this with the situation with music. The musician/label can readily choose to convert their content to as many alternative technologies as they like (be they other DRM technology or non-DRM technology). These labels have, in fact, done precisely this with other DRM technologies (Rhapsody, Napster, Windows Media, etc). You, the user, also have the ability to select the technology and DRM regime most appropriate for yourself. Even if some particular artist is not available in some system, the copyright owners could have done it without substantial cost if they wanted to and you can always select another artist.
Now you might argue that a particular set of users might become locked into a particular vendor if they make a substantial investment in any one vendor's music format, but this does not automatically grant Apple monopoly powers anymore than it grants Gilette's a monopoly mere because you bought a Gilette Mach 3 razor (and so presumably need to keep on purchasing gillete blades).
When and if Apple reaches such a point that there are no other real alternatives, when most users have some a large investment in iTunes Music that they would not even consider anything else, then maybe, just maybe, the courts might compel Apple to share their DRM technology to foster competition within that space. However, I think this is unlikely to happen in the near future because:
1) DRM is difficult to ossify into a multi-vendor standard. Its very strength lies in its proprietariness and in its ability to constantly change as new threats emerge. (Perhaps in binary/online/non-source form...)
2) The distribution is digital, i.e., no need to worry about physical inventory costs, and the digital players can so readily accomodate many different formats.
3) Because the labels and most non-pragmatic successful musicians are simply unwilling to place the bulk of their most popular music in a weak or unprotected format.
My point of view is that DRM and P2P-like battles are inevitable. We can't simultaneously have unrestricted sharing of files across the internet, facilitate completely open file formats that can be shared instantly and anonymously, and a system that encourages the recording of music in the future. The artists and the labels aren't stupid (contrary to slashdot's popular opinion) They know and appreciate this fact. Your political capital would be far better spent lobbying for more flexible and more compatible DRM than against DRM itself.
The "disadvantage" applies to the entire GPL community, both GPL v2 and GPL v3 supporters. Too bad Stallman places his idealistic whims above the more practical concerns of its developers and its users. I think either one of two things is going to happen: either a large number of projects adopt GPL v3 and stay with it thereby dramatically splinting the open source movement for the worse OR Stallman loses much of his credibility and those few developers that do adopt GPL v3 revert back to GPL v2 ONLY.
I wasn't completely sure before, but now there's no doubt.
At bare minimum my knowledge and experience with patents suggests that the facts that I present are about 100x more likely to be true than your own. In point of fact you were wildly incorrect about a very fundamental aspect of patent law. This also suggests that you have never made a concerted attempt read and understand virtually any of the patents that slashdot has whined about. If you had you would realize that your understanding was fundamentally incorrect since the vast majority of patents with misinterpretation of patent law would either be impossible to violate (since the seperate claims are often mutually exclusive and it would be impractical to violate them all in any one product) or that those few remaining patents would be impossible to violate or at least trivial to work around (since each additional claim would create a patent of very narrow scope)
For instance, if you had actually read Alan Cox's "DRM" patent would know that claims 1 and 7 would cancel each other out (with your "all elements" interpretation of patents).
Alternatively, if you had actually read the much whined about Amazon "1-click" patent you would know that, at the very least, any website could trivially work around Amazon's patent by simply not employing "speaking of a sound" (accepting the user's voice input) to trigger the 1-click action (claim #1). Not to mention that the patent would be impossible to violate because claim #3 (clicking a button) and claim #4 (accepting voice input) are mutually exclusive (with your flawed understanding).
My opinions about the overall value of IP are also far more likely to be worthwhile since they are guided by actual experience and knowledge instead of slashdot's typical group-think, FUD, and scaremongering.
Oh, and by the way, why is it OK for you to cite your experience ("I've done both plumbing and electrical myself, about 4 years of experience in them actually) but not for me to talk about mine? Quite the double standard.
Presuming you're actually old enough to vote, we both just have one vote, but my vote will be a whole hell of a lot more informed than your own. And while you're entitled to your own vote and own opinion, you're not entitled to your own set of facts.
Your assertion was simply wrong so there was no reason for me to read through a bunch of sophomoric rants on slashdot. If you still think the "article" illustrated something relevant to this debate, then please tell us exactly what it was.
1) Most US corporations are merely incorporated in Delaware -- not headquartered there. Big difference.
2) Why are you singling out the Republicans? Half of these people (Biden and Feinstein) are Democrats. Feinsteinis is the only one on this list that I see with big entertainment dollars behind her: Her top two contributors are Disney and Time-Warner... at least ~200K
http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/allzips.as
3) This bill actually seems pretty reasonable to me. It's basically just putting internet/satellite radio stations on the same fee structure (if you want to use copyright law to broadcast someone else's music) as FM/AM radio and insists that you don't allow consumers to willy-nilly record everything (time shifting is still allowed). What gives... besides the usual "everything should be free" mentality?
You don't have to take my word for it. Read this:
Something infringes a patent if it has all the elements of a claim in the patent, or performs all the steps of a claim. It does not have to match all the claims, a single one will do. However, it is important that it matches all elements in that single claim. Most patent courts take this requirement quite strictly and will not easily ignore an element in a claim unless it is clearly irrelevant. One often-heard argument against ignoring an element is that patent writers are aware of the strict interpretation and so would not put in an element unless necessary. Therefore, an element that is present in the claim must have been deemed necessary and so may not be ignored.
I didn't read this case, but citing slashdot on patent issues is like citing Soviet propaganda to find out about the US Constitution. It is just about the worst place to find reliable information on patents.