I am honored, sir, but I don't think it appropriate to call me a misogynist just because I don't like Elton John.
ROFL!
I am sorely tempted to assume that this latest reply of yours is intentional irony, because if so (or even if not!) it is superb, delicious icing on the 7-layered cake of this already entertaining thread.[*] But just in case you were serious... even though I take guilty pleasure in some of Elton John's Disney animated movie ditties, by and large I agree with your sentiments about his work, especially as compared to that of The Who. (I mean, isn't that Bernie guy the unsung (sorry) wind beneath his wings, anyway?)
(Phew, I believe this is the most off-topic I've ever gotten on slashdot. As penance I will remove my +1 karma bonus, and accept whatever further punishment the mods choose to give me.)
[*] I must have been channeling The Tick with that sentence.
First there are the insightful/funny/informative/interesting posts that prompt one to dole out +1 mods as an expression of appreciation. Then you have the even better posts that tempt you to forfeit those mod powers to join in and contribute to the dialogue. But above all those, are the comments & threads that are just *so* good, you bookmark/copy them at redundant geographical locations and media, just to ensure that you can always refer to them again and again, whenever the notion arises.
Thank you (and thank PopeRatzo for his comical misogyny... whether he meant it to be funny or not.)
My experience is that the pumping emails are sent out after the market closes for the day, and usually on a Friday at that. They are counting on retail investors (read: in-duh-viduals) to place orders with their broker at night after getting home from work, or over the weekend. So, the pop on the next trading day is quite frequently an instantaneous "gap up", or happens within a matter of a few minutes. Good luck catching that wave.
And since the stocks being pumped are generally pink-sheet material, its tough to find shares available for borrowing, for the purpose of shorting. The pumpers intentionally pick illiquid stocks, because illiquidity (a) amplifies the effect of their pumping efforts, and (b) limits the ability of shorters to attenuate their pump & dump profits. (In this respect short sellers are like positive reactance in an AC circuit.)
As of 2007-01-02, your sig says:
If you can tell me what my next action will be, I will give you a million dollars. OK, I'll bite.
In the instant after reading this sentence, your next action will be: intentionally and willfully refraining from gifting me one million dollars, by the specific process of contacting me at synaptik_slashdot@yahoo.com so that I can reply to your email with a paypal account by which you can tender your payment of the one million dollars, payable to the name that I will also disclose therein.
...
Hmm. Since you've now read the above, but I haven't received the one million dollars from you, I can only assume that my prediction of your subsequent action ("intentionally and willfully refraining from gifting me one million dollars") came true, and thus I have met the requirements of your offer.
Therefore, please contact me at synaptik_slashdot@yahoo.com so that I can reply to your email with a paypal account by which you can tender your payment of the one million dollars, payable to the name that I will also disclose therein.
You aren't the first to make this point to me, although you were more direct about it. I generally disdain perpetual welfare (be it for humans or corporations,) but I can't argue with the the good sense of staying prepared for the worst.
Everyone has a personal responsibility to their own survival, but preserving national food sources and distribution infrastructure is kind of beyond the scope of the typical (sub)urbanite who's idea of hunting or foraging for food is walking down the aisle of the grocery store.
Simple economics cannot deal well with issues of risk management. It always seems to make economic 'sense' to operate without a safety net, but the common welfare and national security require retaining ability to produce locally... Laissez-faire only works well for pure commodities where barriers to entry are near zero. That's a damn good point, thanks. Price floors as insurance policies... hmmm...
Again, you make the same mistake. The price of milk is HIGH because of a subsidy called a price floor. Or, well, a facet of corporate welfare, however you want to call it. The price floor is to ensure that milk is produced domestically and not imported. Thank you. Perhaps if I had bothered to google for 'price floor', I'd have known that it is established economic jargon with specific meaning, and not just random wordage chosen by some passing AC. Now that I know better, I can at least explain the apparent idiocy of me (initially) claiming that the removal of a price floor would cause a spike in prices:
My first intuition of 'price floor' was a mechanism by which the government reacts to insufficient demand by paying producers the difference between $FLOOR and $MARKET_EQUILIBRIUM, when there's not enough demanders willing to pay at the higher $FLOOR. This would be a direct subsidy to the producers, for the sole purpose of keeping them in business (ie, welfare.) So... in this inaccurate model of a price floor, if the government quit paying that difference, the producers would then attempt sell at higher than what the buyers were previously buying at, which would be perceived by buyers as a price spike (since the govt wouldn't be subsidizing a portion of the asking price any more, pre-market.)
However, thanks to Wikipedia I now know that 'price floor' is actually the government requiring the producer not sell below some minimum price, with the promise that said government will purchase any resulting surplus... surplus which would naturally happen if the price floor was set above market equilibrium.
Anyway... prescriptive subsidies for corporate welfare is universally bad, in my book....Just let the damn foreigners sell us their cheap bovine mammary juice! If the quality & safety is the same, why pay more than necessary? Blah blah, "comparative advantage," blah blah blah.
FYI: "Milk Pricing in the United States" indicates that the actual pricing system for milk is quite complex, and apparently has further rationale beyond just protectionism. (No, I haven't read all of it, nor do I intend to.)
Finally: this thread was supposed to be about Sony enabling PS3 arbitrage by setting their launch price too low. I wish I had never fed that "farmers dumping produce in the trash" troll.
if I want to respond to you, I'll respond to [you]. Of course, and I wasn't demanding a reply (although I did invite one.) All I meant by what you quoted is that I'd be disappointed if the person launching that particular "dumbass" diatribe behind the shield of AC posting was you, resorting to anonymous vindictives instead of cogent argument. I'd rather people not reply at all than resort to those antics. (Yes, I know... "I must be new here.")
The only 'flaw' I know of in my post-under-discussion is that (a) I didn't make it clear I was talking about the *asking* price spiking, and (b) I was apparently ignorant of the actual mechanics of how an agricultural subsidy is actually implemented by the gov.
But, I don't believe either of those flaws to be fatal to my argument; the mechanism of subsidy is immaterial. So if my argument is a house of cards, then I'm still waiting for someone to elucidate. But thus far no one has risen to that challenge.
Recap:
(1) Your assertion that milk would be 'too expensive to make' without subsidies seems to be the flawed argument. There is simply too much milk being produced. Instead of artificially inflating demand by lowering the price, just let some dairy farms falter. Supply will then drop to the point where price has risen enough to cover the cost of production, and provide a reasonable ROI. There will be less supply, but also less demand. And, the dairy farms remaining will actually earn a reasonable living. The others will move on to other sources of (hopefully unsubsidized) income.
(2) This shell game with subsidies doesn't reduce the cost of producing milk anyway. We still pay that cost as either deficit, taxes, or inflation.
If you disagree with (3), I'd like to see a source... but it's largely tangental to my economical argument anyway. I *hope* you don't disagree with (2), although you might believe that taxes are OK, as long as the wealthier-than-you croud is paying it. (If so, then we're arguing opinion, not fact.) So your best bet in exposing my argument as a house of cards is to find fault with (1).
Lest you think me a troll: I used to be much more right-wing on social issues than I am now. I've moved to slightly left-of-center over the years, due in no small part to counter arguments that I could not refute.
I really hope you are not Travoltus in disguise, Mr. AC... I was hoping for better.
I was thinking in terms of a constant price offset paid by the govt, not a price floor (effectively a variable offset.) So yes, I would expect the asking price on the wholesale market to jump if a constant offset was removed. But, even that's not guaranteed; how this pretend situation (w/ price offset) plays out could actually start at step (D), instead of step (A).
In fact, if I revise my understanding to assume a price floor instead of a price offset, then I believe we would start at (D):
* (D)Many milk producers would go out of business (either by choice, or by default).
* (E)Thus supply is reduced to the point where the wholesale price of milk exceeds the cost to produce it by an acceptable margin of wholesale profit, commensurate with the risks to capital one incurs in the business of milk production.[2]
I should admit my ignorance of the actual implementation details of the mechanism used by the government for this type of subsidy. Now that you mention it, a price floor seems more sensible than a price offset (although it feels weird to use the word "sensible" in the same sentence as "subsidy.")
But all of this banter about offset-versus-floor doesn't change the bulk of my post. So for you to focus on this one particular poorly-defined-by-me aspect of my comment, and then follow with an ad hominem, is really sub par and in bad sport. As I said above, I'm really hoping you're truly some 3rd party AC troll, and not the worthy Travoltus I was responding to.
If the Government didn't subsidize stuff like milk (prop up the price) it would be too expensive to make.
(Quick point of fact: A subsidy does not prop up prices. It artificially lowers them, by paying part of the cost "behind the scenes". A price support does the opposite; it artificially raises them, through tactics such as the imposition of tarrifs, and paying domestic producers to destroy supply.)
I find it interesting that you changed the example commodity in use within this thread from sugar to milk. The cynic in me wonders if you did this because milk is deemed a necessity by many people, whereas bulk sugar isn't. If that was your primary reason for switching, then you'd be potentially guilty of exploiting fear to help support your argument. However, I'll assume that your switch to milk as an example was benign. Regardless, "you may be surprised to learn that most of the human beings that live on planet Earth today do not drink or use cow's milk."
In any case, I'll continue with your milk analogy.[1]
That would result in an immediate monopoly, or worse, nobody making it at all.
If the subsidy suddenly disappeared, then...
(A) there'd be a near-instantaneous spike in the price of milk. Then...
(B) Demand for milk would fall.
(C)Supply would greatly outstrip demand, causing suppliers to compete for sales by reducing prices.
(D)Many milk producers would go out of business (either by choice, or by default).
(E)Thus supply is reduced to the point where the wholesale price of milk exceeds the cost to produce it by an acceptable margin of wholesale profit, commensurate with the risks to capital one incurs in the business of milk production.[2]
Would this process, particularly steps (A) and (D), be disruptive? You bet! But, that's the fault of the government baffoon that decided to subsidize the price of milk in the first place. I am tempted to use the analogy of crack cocaine here: going through withdrawal is always a bitch. (Perhaps this is why welfare recipients tend to stay on welfare, making it a perpetual hand-out rather than the temporary hand-up that it ought to be.)
Could step (D) result in a hegemonic monopoly? Doubtful. You could end up with a monopoly in the sense of "only one supplier", but not in the sense of "exclusive power or privelege of selling." Milk is sooo commoditized, that there really is little barrier to entry by competitors. Said monopoly would have no pricing control at all. Any attempt to jack up prices would be inviting competition. (Hmm, is that the influence of some Invisible Hand, that I'm feeling right now? "A little lower, please... a little to the left... aah, that's the spot.")
Thus, I would conclude this particular retort by saying you have confused cause with effect. If the government's milk subsidy disappeared, milk would indeed become temporarily "too expensive to make", but that's the fault of the government encouraging oversupply through the very subsidy that you claim is saving us from high milk prices. In fact, the currently lower price you think you're paying for milk is an illusion. You're still paying the difference; either in the form of taxes, or inflation due to the printing of new $$$ to pay for the subsidy.
Next you said:
But since we have milk on the shelves you haven't been a victim of such a shortage, so you probably think it couldn't happen.
I'm not really sure how the present subsidy eliminates the risk of said shortages. What are you thinking of here? Natural disasters? Some pathogen obliterating our stock of dairy cows? Transport infrastructure crumbling? In New Orleans, August 2005, you probably couldn't buy a gallon of milk for $1000. And, that's wi
This is the problem with Capitalism in the Long Run, at least with respect to it's ultimate purpose as a method of deciding how to distribute goods. Whether its scalpers interfering with the supply of tickets, Enron turning power plants off, farmers dumping their produce in the trash, grocers allowing it to rot on the shelves, or any of many other examples, Capitalism is increasingly being used as an excuse to destroy goods rather than distribute them.
The problem here was not a failure of capitalism; the problem was Sony setting the launch price too low. At launch, demand exceeded supply. Whether that demand was from scalpers or legitimate end users is irrelevant. If Sony had said, "our launch price is $3X, but will reduce to $X by $FUTURE_DATE", then tere would be little-to-no scalper activity. Those people willing to pay a huge premium instead of standing in line would have their demand met, since the initial price would be so high as to eliminate the lines.
...farmers dumping their produce in the trash
That isn't the fault of capitalism, it's the fault of government interference in how the market prices goods. If the price of corn is too low for all the sugar farmers to turn a profit, then the problem is too many sugar farmers. And most certainly the solution is not to arbitrarily jack up the price of sugar.
And why not? As long as distribution of goods is tied to the money one can obtain for it, then artificially creating shortage through the systematic destruction of that good is an excellent idea.
There wasn't an artificial shortage of PS3s. There was an artificially low price, given the temporary supply constraints, and number of people who wanted to be early owners.
Perhaps by "artifically creating shortage through systematic destruction of that good" you really meant "artifically creating shortage by enabling scalpers to scalp." (I'm allowing you this, since no one was actually destroying PS3s, AFAIK.) In that case, a drastically higher launch price would have solved that problem.
m allergic to (well, not really allergic, but hypersensitive) sugar and various related sweeteners like glucose etc. Before this was known I couldn't handle any criticism, loud noises etc etc. Used to cry a lot (the real heavy tantrums) and everything. I guess I could've been diagnosed with a million mental disorders, however luckily my parents found out it was an oversensitivity towards sugars and a type of foodcoloring. Now I'm perfectly fine. No moodswings anymore etc.
Do you know, is there a medical term for the particular hypersensitivity that you exhibited as a child? Just wanting to grep for more info on this subject.
About 10 years ago there was Anaconda. Relatively unheralded, but with a deliciously villainous Jon Voight. Did rather well I think.
Anaconda? Serious? The only thing I remember about that movie is, the scene where they have to get the boat dislodged off the sand bar they had run aground against. After the snake comes and kicks some ass, they show the boat backing up off of the sand bar... except that the water fall in the background was running backwards, with the water going up! Seems they decided to just splice in the "running aground scene" into the reel backwards to make a "backing up" scene, and hoped no one would notice.
If you are filling up the bagging area then.... YOU ARE TRYING TO BUY TOO MUCH STUFF USING SELF CHECKOUT!
My local grocery store has 4 self-checkout lanes. There are about 8 manned checkout lanes, but I have never seen them operate more than one or two at a time. In fact they usually have maybe 2 cashiers... one of whom is overseeing the self-checkout lanes. (Albertsons has apparently scaled their front-end labor expenses waayy back in the decade since I last worked there.)
So, if your end goal is to get throught the checkout process as quickly as possible, quite often you'll come to the conclusion that the self-service lane might be faster, even though your purchase selections are more appropriate for full-service checkout.
In no case would I ever opt for self-checkout if I had more than 10-ish items... 20 max, just depending on what the items were. I'd also be more inclined to just wait out the full-service line if I thought the odds were high that I'd hold up a lot of people in the self-service line. But if it's clear that I've hit the tail end of a customer crush on the front end, and there's very few people coming in behind me, then I'm a bit more assertive with the use of self-checkout... as much as I hate those infernal, braindead machines.
Both you and the GP forgot to mention: the assinine weight scales on those infernal self-checkout machines. I get so tired of hearing "PLEASE PLACE ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA!" when I've ALREADY PLACED THE FRICKIN' SCANNED ITEM IN THE FRICKIN' BAGGING AREA! You also hear this one when you've filled up all the space on the weigh-scale, and need to move those filled bags back to the shopping cart, to make room for the rest of the crap you've still needing to scan.
Nor did you mention its complement, "PLEASE REMOVE ANOMOLOUS ITEM FROM BAGGING AREA!" just because it thinks the last thing I put there weighs too much.
Damn, those are annoying! It is impossible to get any reasonable throughput on those $#@! self-checkout stands. It routinely takes 2x-3x longer than necessary-- especially if you're buying those little packages of 5 washers-- because of that stupid weight scale. (Yes, I know about the "skip bagging" button, but (a) that's almost just as annoying, and (b) in many retailers, if you hit that button too often, the machine locks up until a human can come make certain you're not trying to steal.
Seriously... just migrate to RFID already, and be done with this weight-scale nonsense!
(I realized, when seeing that your post was AC, that there was a risk that English was not your first language. That was why I gave the English lesson.)
No, the hacker would get 2 seconds of snowy static, until Ri and Ri-prime matched again. Ri and Ri-prime aren't the decryption keys, but they are hashes of the current encryption/decryption key. So the xmitter assumes that if Ri and Ri-prime match, that the receiver has calculated the next decryption key the same way it has. If Ri and Ri-prime did not match, then the keys on either end of the pipe will not match either; causing decryption to fail... and I can vouch from experience that this results in snowy static. (Ri is the xmitter's calculated hash, and Ri-prime is the receiver's. They are exchanged over the serial DDC bus. Also, since Ri is a shorter # of bits than the actual key, you can occasionally get a false-positive, wherein Ri==Ri_prime, but the keys are different. But because of the way the scheme is designed, this would only be a one-in-65536 chance, and wouldn't happen repeatedly in succession... so it's a detectable corner case.)
Also, the "2 second scenario" would only happen on a temporary cable disconnect, or a glitch in the signal (perhaps caused by EMI.)
You also asked:
But then what's the added value of using the video stream data as an extra protection?
The "added value of using the video stream" as a salting process for subsequent key computations would have been to address the security issue presented by gnasher719:
HDCP generates a cipher bitstream. The cipher depends on the key in the graphics card, the key in the receiver, and a random seed. The graphics card outputs (content xor cipher). If you can record the encrypted output stream, and then convince the graphics card to send a black screen to the monitor, encrypted using the same random seed (and the keys are the same because you use the same graphics card and monitor), then you can know record (black xor cipher).
I think gnasher719 assumes that the encryption method itself makes primary use of an XOR gate to mask the cleartext with the encryption key. If his conjecture is right, then he has a good point. But I countered by stating that the HDCP folks could alleviate that risk somewhat by using the CRC of the decrypted frame as a salt when calculating the next encryption key. Then gnasher719's scheme (as stated) becomes ineffective, because he has 2 unknowns to solve for now, not just 1. Of course, he might be able to compensate by adding a new XOR term to his stated formula, provided that he can learn the value of that new term. I believe he can.
But, I still maintain that gnasher719's greatest hurdle is coaxing the transmitter to use the same pseudorandom seed for both the black stream, and the subsequent real stream. That's where his exploit really falls down.
I think the re-synching scheme is intended for error tolerance only. The problem can be seen today with normal DVDs. If a DVD is damaged, the decompression may fail and cause blocks on the screen. Fast forward resets the decompression and the blocks go away.
In the case of HDCP, it is for both error tolerance, and for detecting man-in-the-middle attacks. DVDs correct them selves when you do that, because of how MPEG is set up; every so often, there is a full still image of a frame on the disk (I think they are called "I frames".) Stuff in between the I frames are temporal deltas. So, when things get out of whack, just skip past the deltas to the next I frame (or whatever its called) and you're back to good.
BTW, it seems that the HDCP 1.1 spec is free (libris) for viewing by anyone: Link
Consequently, I just re-RTFM'd, and... revision 1.1
It seems to be highly unlikely. The re-synching is needed to make sure exactly what you said "to make sure that they are both still on the same page".
You took me too literally. When I said "...on the same page," I was employing an anglo-centric idiom that means (in the context of this discussion,) both the transmitter and receiver are each fully aware of what the other device is doing at that exact point in time. I didn't mean "page" as in a frame of video, which you seem to have thought.
If it uses the data from the video stream, then how are you supposed to watch the movie from the middle, or to fast forward? Or, say, if you switch the channel, then go back?
Then-- if my CRC salting conjecture is fact, and not fiction-- you affect the calculations of Ri-prime from that point forward, as compared to what they would have been if you just passively watched the video from beginning to end with no user intervention... but so what? Both transmitter and recipient still have all the information they need to salt the next Ri-prime calculation with a CRC of the previous frame sent across. They are, as I said, still "on the same page" with respect to the encryption algorithm.
You might now raise the objection that using the prior video frame's CRC to salt the key for the next 2 second period can cause loss of encryption synchronization between transmitter and receiver, should transmission errors creep in that cause the calculated CRC values to not match (ie, using frame CRC as a salt would cause them to no longer be "on the same page."
My response would be: You're right, but the transmitter would notice this discrepancy 2 seconds later, and initiate a new handshake; essentially starting the encryption process over from scratch, at whatever point in the movie you happened to be at, at the time. End user would experience about 2 seconds of snow, in the meanwhile, until the system corrected itself.
But again, this is somewhat conjecture because I can't recall if IEDQ actually does that, or not.
The HDCP cypher is re-calculated every 120 vsyncs (approx. every 2 seconds,) and the transmitter queries the receiver at that same period/interval to make sure that they are both still on the same page, so to speak. What if that new Ri-prime calculation incorporates some of the specific video data sent during the prior frame, as a salt?[*] Then the specific content sent will have an effect on the encryption keys used over time, and consequently your XOR trick will not work.
Getting the graphics card to use the same random seed twice may also be a challenge.
[*] I say, "what if..." because it's been a while since I've read the HDCP spec, and I don't recall if my conjecture is really the case, or not.
For HDCP, your 'replay attack' would only work if all recipients of the digital bootleg had the same display device... and I don't mean just the same model of display from the same manufacturer; I mean one with the same decryption keys as yours. While I don't know this next statement is true for a certainty, I strongly suspect that the decryption keys in the display terminus are unique to each device that comes off the assembly lines.
Plus, the replay would be a decompressed encrypted stream, meaning that entropy would be very high, and therefore compression efforts after capture would yield a negligible reduction in file size, at best. Translation: you'll be P2P'ing a big honking file.
Oh, and to top it off: your compression scheme would have to be lossless, further limiting your gain from compression efforts. Lossy compression would mess up the encrypted data in undesireable ways.
So yeah... your replay attack works for HDCP, but only for small values of "works".
...or perhaps I should say, taxing gasoline *more*. After all, the power is coming from somewhere... you know, conservation of energy, and all that jive?
So, instead of tearing up the road, installing this infrastructure, and then paying to maintain it, why not just add 1 cent more of taxes to a gallon of gas, and earmark that money for the purpose of paying the electric bill? Seems a lot simpler. Besides, the taxes levied really ought to accurately reflect the full cost of utilizing the municipality's infrastructure... if this cost is something the bean-counters have overlooked in the past, just add it to the tax bill.
Slashdot Mirror
+1 Funny! (And yet, all your mods thought it insightful...)
I am sorely tempted to assume that this latest reply of yours is intentional irony, because if so (or even if not!) it is superb, delicious icing on the 7-layered cake of this already entertaining thread.[*] But just in case you were serious... even though I take guilty pleasure in some of Elton John's Disney animated movie ditties, by and large I agree with your sentiments about his work, especially as compared to that of The Who. (I mean, isn't that Bernie guy the unsung (sorry) wind beneath his wings, anyway?)
(Phew, I believe this is the most off-topic I've ever gotten on slashdot. As penance I will remove my +1 karma bonus, and accept whatever further punishment the mods choose to give me.)
[*] I must have been channeling The Tick with that sentence.
First there are the insightful/funny/informative/interesting posts that prompt one to dole out +1 mods as an expression of appreciation. Then you have the even better posts that tempt you to forfeit those mod powers to join in and contribute to the dialogue. But above all those, are the comments & threads that are just *so* good, you bookmark/copy them at redundant geographical locations and media, just to ensure that you can always refer to them again and again, whenever the notion arises.
Thank you (and thank PopeRatzo for his comical misogyny... whether he meant it to be funny or not.)
My experience is that the pumping emails are sent out after the market closes for the day, and usually on a Friday at that. They are counting on retail investors (read: in-duh-viduals) to place orders with their broker at night after getting home from work, or over the weekend. So, the pop on the next trading day is quite frequently an instantaneous "gap up", or happens within a matter of a few minutes. Good luck catching that wave.
And since the stocks being pumped are generally pink-sheet material, its tough to find shares available for borrowing, for the purpose of shorting. The pumpers intentionally pick illiquid stocks, because illiquidity (a) amplifies the effect of their pumping efforts, and (b) limits the ability of shorters to attenuate their pump & dump profits. (In this respect short sellers are like positive reactance in an AC circuit.)
In the instant after reading this sentence, your next action will be: intentionally and willfully refraining from gifting me one million dollars, by the specific process of contacting me at synaptik_slashdot@yahoo.com so that I can reply to your email with a paypal account by which you can tender your payment of the one million dollars, payable to the name that I will also disclose therein.
Hmm. Since you've now read the above, but I haven't received the one million dollars from you, I can only assume that my prediction of your subsequent action ("intentionally and willfully refraining from gifting me one million dollars") came true, and thus I have met the requirements of your offer.
Therefore, please contact me at synaptik_slashdot@yahoo.com so that I can reply to your email with a paypal account by which you can tender your payment of the one million dollars, payable to the name that I will also disclose therein.
You aren't the first to make this point to me, although you were more direct about it. I generally disdain perpetual welfare (be it for humans or corporations,) but I can't argue with the the good sense of staying prepared for the worst.
Everyone has a personal responsibility to their own survival, but preserving national food sources and distribution infrastructure is kind of beyond the scope of the typical (sub)urbanite who's idea of hunting or foraging for food is walking down the aisle of the grocery store.
My first intuition of 'price floor' was a mechanism by which the government reacts to insufficient demand by paying producers the difference between $FLOOR and $MARKET_EQUILIBRIUM, when there's not enough demanders willing to pay at the higher $FLOOR. This would be a direct subsidy to the producers, for the sole purpose of keeping them in business (ie, welfare.) So... in this inaccurate model of a price floor, if the government quit paying that difference, the producers would then attempt sell at higher than what the buyers were previously buying at, which would be perceived by buyers as a price spike (since the govt wouldn't be subsidizing a portion of the asking price any more, pre-market.)
However, thanks to Wikipedia I now know that 'price floor' is actually the government requiring the producer not sell below some minimum price, with the promise that said government will purchase any resulting surplus... surplus which would naturally happen if the price floor was set above market equilibrium.
Anyway... prescriptive subsidies for corporate welfare is universally bad, in my book.
FYI: "Milk Pricing in the United States" indicates that the actual pricing system for milk is quite complex, and apparently has further rationale beyond just protectionism. (No, I haven't read all of it, nor do I intend to.)
Finally: this thread was supposed to be about Sony enabling PS3 arbitrage by setting their launch price too low. I wish I had never fed that "farmers dumping produce in the trash" troll.
I'll shut up now.
The only 'flaw' I know of in my post-under-discussion is that (a) I didn't make it clear I was talking about the *asking* price spiking, and (b) I was apparently ignorant of the actual mechanics of how an agricultural subsidy is actually implemented by the gov.
But, I don't believe either of those flaws to be fatal to my argument; the mechanism of subsidy is immaterial. So if my argument is a house of cards, then I'm still waiting for someone to elucidate. But thus far no one has risen to that challenge.
Recap:
(1) Your assertion that milk would be 'too expensive to make' without subsidies seems to be the flawed argument. There is simply too much milk being produced. Instead of artificially inflating demand by lowering the price, just let some dairy farms falter. Supply will then drop to the point where price has risen enough to cover the cost of production, and provide a reasonable ROI. There will be less supply, but also less demand. And, the dairy farms remaining will actually earn a reasonable living. The others will move on to other sources of (hopefully unsubsidized) income.
(2) This shell game with subsidies doesn't reduce the cost of producing milk anyway. We still pay that cost as either deficit, taxes, or inflation.
(3) Milk is not a necessity.
If you disagree with (3), I'd like to see a source... but it's largely tangental to my economical argument anyway. I *hope* you don't disagree with (2), although you might believe that taxes are OK, as long as the wealthier-than-you croud is paying it. (If so, then we're arguing opinion, not fact.) So your best bet in exposing my argument as a house of cards is to find fault with (1).
Lest you think me a troll: I used to be much more right-wing on social issues than I am now. I've moved to slightly left-of-center over the years, due in no small part to counter arguments that I could not refute.
I really hope you are not Travoltus in disguise, Mr. AC... I was hoping for better.
I was thinking in terms of a constant price offset paid by the govt, not a price floor (effectively a variable offset.) So yes, I would expect the asking price on the wholesale market to jump if a constant offset was removed. But, even that's not guaranteed; how this pretend situation (w/ price offset) plays out could actually start at step (D), instead of step (A).
In fact, if I revise my understanding to assume a price floor instead of a price offset, then I believe we would start at (D):
* (D)Many milk producers would go out of business (either by choice, or by default).
* (E)Thus supply is reduced to the point where the wholesale price of milk exceeds the cost to produce it by an acceptable margin of wholesale profit, commensurate with the risks to capital one incurs in the business of milk production.[2]
I should admit my ignorance of the actual implementation details of the mechanism used by the government for this type of subsidy. Now that you mention it, a price floor seems more sensible than a price offset (although it feels weird to use the word "sensible" in the same sentence as "subsidy.")
But all of this banter about offset-versus-floor doesn't change the bulk of my post. So for you to focus on this one particular poorly-defined-by-me aspect of my comment, and then follow with an ad hominem, is really sub par and in bad sport. As I said above, I'm really hoping you're truly some 3rd party AC troll, and not the worthy Travoltus I was responding to.
If the Government didn't subsidize stuff like milk (prop up the price) it would be too expensive to make.
(Quick point of fact: A subsidy does not prop up prices. It artificially lowers them, by paying part of the cost "behind the scenes". A price support does the opposite; it artificially raises them, through tactics such as the imposition of tarrifs, and paying domestic producers to destroy supply.)
I find it interesting that you changed the example commodity in use within this thread from sugar to milk. The cynic in me wonders if you did this because milk is deemed a necessity by many people, whereas bulk sugar isn't. If that was your primary reason for switching, then you'd be potentially guilty of exploiting fear to help support your argument. However, I'll assume that your switch to milk as an example was benign. Regardless, "you may be surprised to learn that most of the human beings that live on planet Earth today do not drink or use cow's milk."
In any case, I'll continue with your milk analogy.[1]
That would result in an immediate monopoly, or worse, nobody making it at all.
If the subsidy suddenly disappeared, then...
Would this process, particularly steps (A) and (D), be disruptive? You bet! But, that's the fault of the government baffoon that decided to subsidize the price of milk in the first place. I am tempted to use the analogy of crack cocaine here: going through withdrawal is always a bitch. (Perhaps this is why welfare recipients tend to stay on welfare, making it a perpetual hand-out rather than the temporary hand-up that it ought to be.)
Could step (D) result in a hegemonic monopoly? Doubtful. You could end up with a monopoly in the sense of "only one supplier", but not in the sense of "exclusive power or privelege of selling." Milk is sooo commoditized, that there really is little barrier to entry by competitors. Said monopoly would have no pricing control at all. Any attempt to jack up prices would be inviting competition. (Hmm, is that the influence of some Invisible Hand, that I'm feeling right now? "A little lower, please... a little to the left... aah, that's the spot.")
Thus, I would conclude this particular retort by saying you have confused cause with effect. If the government's milk subsidy disappeared, milk would indeed become temporarily "too expensive to make", but that's the fault of the government encouraging oversupply through the very subsidy that you claim is saving us from high milk prices. In fact, the currently lower price you think you're paying for milk is an illusion. You're still paying the difference; either in the form of taxes, or inflation due to the printing of new $$$ to pay for the subsidy.
Next you said:
But since we have milk on the shelves you haven't been a victim of such a shortage, so you probably think it couldn't happen.
I'm not really sure how the present subsidy eliminates the risk of said shortages. What are you thinking of here? Natural disasters? Some pathogen obliterating our stock of dairy cows? Transport infrastructure crumbling? In New Orleans, August 2005, you probably couldn't buy a gallon of milk for $1000. And, that's wi
The problem here was not a failure of capitalism; the problem was Sony setting the launch price too low. At launch, demand exceeded supply. Whether that demand was from scalpers or legitimate end users is irrelevant. If Sony had said, "our launch price is $3X, but will reduce to $X by $FUTURE_DATE", then tere would be little-to-no scalper activity. Those people willing to pay a huge premium instead of standing in line would have their demand met, since the initial price would be so high as to eliminate the lines.
That isn't the fault of capitalism, it's the fault of government interference in how the market prices goods. If the price of corn is too low for all the sugar farmers to turn a profit, then the problem is too many sugar farmers. And most certainly the solution is not to arbitrarily jack up the price of sugar.
There wasn't an artificial shortage of PS3s. There was an artificially low price, given the temporary supply constraints, and number of people who wanted to be early owners.
Perhaps by "artifically creating shortage through systematic destruction of that good" you really meant "artifically creating shortage by enabling scalpers to scalp." (I'm allowing you this, since no one was actually destroying PS3s, AFAIK.) In that case, a drastically higher launch price would have solved that problem.
Do you know, is there a medical term for the particular hypersensitivity that you exhibited as a child? Just wanting to grep for more info on this subject.
My local grocery store has 4 self-checkout lanes. There are about 8 manned checkout lanes, but I have never seen them operate more than one or two at a time. In fact they usually have maybe 2 cashiers... one of whom is overseeing the self-checkout lanes. (Albertsons has apparently scaled their front-end labor expenses waayy back in the decade since I last worked there.)
So, if your end goal is to get throught the checkout process as quickly as possible, quite often you'll come to the conclusion that the self-service lane might be faster, even though your purchase selections are more appropriate for full-service checkout.
In no case would I ever opt for self-checkout if I had more than 10-ish items... 20 max, just depending on what the items were. I'd also be more inclined to just wait out the full-service line if I thought the odds were high that I'd hold up a lot of people in the self-service line. But if it's clear that I've hit the tail end of a customer crush on the front end, and there's very few people coming in behind me, then I'm a bit more assertive with the use of self-checkout... as much as I hate those infernal, braindead machines.
Both you and the GP forgot to mention: the assinine weight scales on those infernal self-checkout machines. I get so tired of hearing "PLEASE PLACE ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA!" when I've ALREADY PLACED THE FRICKIN' SCANNED ITEM IN THE FRICKIN' BAGGING AREA! You also hear this one when you've filled up all the space on the weigh-scale, and need to move those filled bags back to the shopping cart, to make room for the rest of the crap you've still needing to scan.
Nor did you mention its complement, "PLEASE REMOVE ANOMOLOUS ITEM FROM BAGGING AREA!" just because it thinks the last thing I put there weighs too much.
Damn, those are annoying! It is impossible to get any reasonable throughput on those $#@! self-checkout stands. It routinely takes 2x-3x longer than necessary-- especially if you're buying those little packages of 5 washers-- because of that stupid weight scale. (Yes, I know about the "skip bagging" button, but (a) that's almost just as annoying, and (b) in many retailers, if you hit that button too often, the machine locks up until a human can come make certain you're not trying to steal.
Seriously... just migrate to RFID already, and be done with this weight-scale nonsense!
No, the hacker would get 2 seconds of snowy static, until Ri and Ri-prime matched again. Ri and Ri-prime aren't the decryption keys, but they are hashes of the current encryption/decryption key. So the xmitter assumes that if Ri and Ri-prime match, that the receiver has calculated the next decryption key the same way it has. If Ri and Ri-prime did not match, then the keys on either end of the pipe will not match either; causing decryption to fail... and I can vouch from experience that this results in snowy static. (Ri is the xmitter's calculated hash, and Ri-prime is the receiver's. They are exchanged over the serial DDC bus. Also, since Ri is a shorter # of bits than the actual key, you can occasionally get a false-positive, wherein Ri==Ri_prime, but the keys are different. But because of the way the scheme is designed, this would only be a one-in-65536 chance, and wouldn't happen repeatedly in succession... so it's a detectable corner case.)
Also, the "2 second scenario" would only happen on a temporary cable disconnect, or a glitch in the signal (perhaps caused by EMI.)
You also asked:
The "added value of using the video stream" as a salting process for subsequent key computations would have been to address the security issue presented by gnasher719:
I think gnasher719 assumes that the encryption method itself makes primary use of an XOR gate to mask the cleartext with the encryption key. If his conjecture is right, then he has a good point. But I countered by stating that the HDCP folks could alleviate that risk somewhat by using the CRC of the decrypted frame as a salt when calculating the next encryption key. Then gnasher719's scheme (as stated) becomes ineffective, because he has 2 unknowns to solve for now, not just 1. Of course, he might be able to compensate by adding a new XOR term to his stated formula, provided that he can learn the value of that new term. I believe he can.
But, I still maintain that gnasher719's greatest hurdle is coaxing the transmitter to use the same pseudorandom seed for both the black stream, and the subsequent real stream. That's where his exploit really falls down.
In the case of HDCP, it is for both error tolerance, and for detecting man-in-the-middle attacks. DVDs correct them selves when you do that, because of how MPEG is set up; every so often, there is a full still image of a frame on the disk (I think they are called "I frames".) Stuff in between the I frames are temporal deltas. So, when things get out of whack, just skip past the deltas to the next I frame (or whatever its called) and you're back to good.
BTW, it seems that the HDCP 1.1 spec is free (libris) for viewing by anyone: Link
Consequently, I just re-RTFM'd, and... revision 1.1
You took me too literally. When I said "...on the same page," I was employing an anglo-centric idiom that means (in the context of this discussion,) both the transmitter and receiver are each fully aware of what the other device is doing at that exact point in time. I didn't mean "page" as in a frame of video, which you seem to have thought.
Then-- if my CRC salting conjecture is fact, and not fiction-- you affect the calculations of Ri-prime from that point forward, as compared to what they would have been if you just passively watched the video from beginning to end with no user intervention... but so what? Both transmitter and recipient still have all the information they need to salt the next Ri-prime calculation with a CRC of the previous frame sent across. They are, as I said, still "on the same page" with respect to the encryption algorithm.
You might now raise the objection that using the prior video frame's CRC to salt the key for the next 2 second period can cause loss of encryption synchronization between transmitter and receiver, should transmission errors creep in that cause the calculated CRC values to not match (ie, using frame CRC as a salt would cause them to no longer be "on the same page."
My response would be: You're right, but the transmitter would notice this discrepancy 2 seconds later, and initiate a new handshake; essentially starting the encryption process over from scratch, at whatever point in the movie you happened to be at, at the time. End user would experience about 2 seconds of snow, in the meanwhile, until the system corrected itself.
But again, this is somewhat conjecture because I can't recall if IEDQ actually does that, or not.
The HDCP cypher is re-calculated every 120 vsyncs (approx. every 2 seconds,) and the transmitter queries the receiver at that same period/interval to make sure that they are both still on the same page, so to speak. What if that new Ri-prime calculation incorporates some of the specific video data sent during the prior frame, as a salt?[*] Then the specific content sent will have an effect on the encryption keys used over time, and consequently your XOR trick will not work.
Getting the graphics card to use the same random seed twice may also be a challenge.
[*] I say, "what if..." because it's been a while since I've read the HDCP spec, and I don't recall if my conjecture is really the case, or not.
For HDCP, your 'replay attack' would only work if all recipients of the digital bootleg had the same display device... and I don't mean just the same model of display from the same manufacturer; I mean one with the same decryption keys as yours. While I don't know this next statement is true for a certainty, I strongly suspect that the decryption keys in the display terminus are unique to each device that comes off the assembly lines.
Plus, the replay would be a decompressed encrypted stream, meaning that entropy would be very high, and therefore compression efforts after capture would yield a negligible reduction in file size, at best. Translation: you'll be P2P'ing a big honking file.
Oh, and to top it off: your compression scheme would have to be lossless, further limiting your gain from compression efforts. Lossy compression would mess up the encrypted data in undesireable ways.
So yeah... your replay attack works for HDCP, but only for small values of "works".
Did you intend that as political commentary, or was it just a humorous misspelling of 'federal'?
OK, so in the downhill case, it's not a tax on gasoline. Fine. But, they are slowing the Earth's rotation down. Tragedy of the commons.
Good point about approaching red-lights. In that case, the driver actually wants to slow down, so it's win-win.
Too true.
...or perhaps I should say, taxing gasoline *more*. After all, the power is coming from somewhere... you know, conservation of energy, and all that jive?
So, instead of tearing up the road, installing this infrastructure, and then paying to maintain it, why not just add 1 cent more of taxes to a gallon of gas, and earmark that money for the purpose of paying the electric bill? Seems a lot simpler. Besides, the taxes levied really ought to accurately reflect the full cost of utilizing the municipality's infrastructure... if this cost is something the bean-counters have overlooked in the past, just add it to the tax bill.