[**] MS-OS and MS-AP are ugly names. Im look forward to seeing (and maybe composing) alternatives. The best I can do at the moment
I suspect that MS-AP will wind up keeping the Microsoft name, and MS-OS will wind up being called "The Windows Operating System Company" or some similar name. This would make sense because MS-OS is going to remain a much more tightly focused company with a single, well known trademark. Thus it makes sense to leverage that trademark as a new company name and let the more diverse MS-AP keep the (also very well known) Microsoft moniker.
The hardware group is the only group that's not a threat to anyone. In fact, it's a group that really is innovative and does not have a monopoly. Ironically, it's the most innovative part of the company, and it has the least integration.
A reasonable and educated person might very well claim that this is not at all ironic- it's the expected result. Monopolies in general tend not to be innovative- they focus on protecting their monopoly and sucking up buyers' cash rather than developing better products. Microsoft's hardware division actually has to compete with other companies for business, so it has to provide products that are good enough to convince people to buy them instead of the competetion.
Microsoft's profession of surprise is not credible.(1) From the inception of this case Microsoft knew, from well-established Supreme Court precedents dating from the beginning of the last century, that a mandated divestiture was a possibility, if not a probability, in the event of an adverse result at trial.... Its failure to anticipate and to prepare to meet such an eventuality gives no reason to afford it an opportunity to do so now.
IOW, "I can't believe that you weren't prepared for the government to ask for a breakup, and if you weren't it's your own fault anyway."
So that means that MS cannot update the kernel in such a way as make any API obsolete or perform worse if any Windows apps still use it? How many times has a Linux kernel API been removed or "downgraded" because of a change in the way the kernel works? In these cases, a new API is created, and everyone is told to use the new API instead of the old (I think cli() vs. spin_lock_irqsave() is a good example). It looks like MS can't do this, which means the Win32 API is going to stagnate.
Actually no. The details of the judgment are a bit more sane than this. Microsoft may degrade the performance of middleware provided that it tells vendors in advance and lets them know what they can do to minimize the damage. IOW, if they come up with a replacment API that improves things, they can comply with the judgment by publicizing it and giving ISVs a chance to change their products before pulling the old one.
Actually, I've noticed that some ISP's have started to include a X-trace line in headers. This includes the exact time, IP address, phone number, etc. that the spammer was using when putting the spam into the system. I've only seen it in USENET postings, but that's because I haven't actually spent any time carefully going over headers on e-mail spam. It should make it very easy to trace, though.
Are we insane? Why are we letting this happen? Every libel case, every time a site is shut down, every time another mouth is hushed we get closer to giving up our freedoms. And we're not doing anything about it. We need to stop these idiocies, we need to convince the lawmakers and the public at large that nothing is worth the abolition of free and unfettered speech. And above all, we need to do it now.
Not that I disagree with the basic notion that the internet should remain free, but free speech has never been absolute and unfettered. Libel, copyright violation, broadcasting military secrets, and the like have never been protected. And well that some forms of speech shouldn't be protected. After all, those DoS packets could be considered a form of free speech and we want them silenced!
Every time that hyperlibertarians support grossly illegal behavior, like massive copyright violation, under the mantle of free speech, it gives the authoritarians who want to shut down all unapproved speech more ammunition. Free speech is important, but it shouldn't be used as a cover for violating other peoples' rights.
For one of those great IBM Linux on System/390 setups. You have a situation where you want a combination of:
Absolute reliability. The whole point of a data haven is that the data is safe, so reliability is paramount. A mainframe offers spectacular reliability.
Security. Getting hacked would be even worse than equipment failure. The compartmentalization of a mainframe would be really useful.
Maintainability. You can't exactly fit a huge support staff onto Sealand, so the ease of maintainability of a single system seems better than a big cluster.
are the telcos really going to give up on charging for telephone-use ? what are they going to live from when everybody is phoning over IP ?
Given that the telco is a government monopoly, you can bet that they'll be happy to do whatever the politicians tell them to. Phone over IP may well be viewed positively. It's theoretically more efficient, which may wind up saving the government money- definitely a good thing.
2. The literacy rate is 93%. It's not some backwoods, third-world country.
Costa Rica is a considerable anomaly among the countries in Latin America. Costa Rica has cleverly avoided the military coups that have been the scourge of much of the rest of Latin America by not having a strong military. They've then taken the savings and plowed a lot of it into social programs. The combination of stable government and good social progams has made Costa Rica about the most successful country in Latin America. Free internet access is just a continuation of the general trend toward enlightened government.
This list is a bit misleading. You'll notice that they give a BSD(aggr) and Linux(aggr). That means that they're lumping together all flavors of BSD into a single category, and all Linux distributions into a single category (although they do count an exploit only once if it appears in multiple distros).
That means that if RedHat has vulnerability A but not B or C, Suse has vulnerability B but not A or C, and Debian has vulnerability C but not A or B, Linux(aggr) is counted as having three exploits. In reality, if you're using just one distribution you'll only experience one of the three, and Slackware might not have any of those exploits.
The following looks a lot more favorable for Linux: OS 97 98 99 00 Debian 2 2 29 5 RedHat 5 10 38 17 Slackware 3 8 10 0 Suse 0 0 21 5 Win NT 4 6 99 37
HP invented the technology that MS uses for their new optical mouse.
Technically speaking, it was Agilent that did the new mouse. Microsoft apparently doesn't have an exclusive purchasing arrangement with them so other manufacturers could (and soon will) make them.
There just isn't enought information to do anything but put a bunch of smart people in front of the data and see what they can figure out.
Of course that could be the goal. If you really want to mess with the other guys, you could use a scheme like this to do it. The process would be pretty simple:
Develop a decent cryptographic random number generator and have it spew out a bunch of random numbers. Even better, mix in a bunch of encrypted, realistic sounding, but bogus messages to your international spy network. Use an encryption scheme that's likely to be very tough to break, but not quite impossible.
Hire a bunch of poor schlubs to read off your list of numbers into a microphone. You can save yourself some time and effort by rebroadcasting the messages several times in rapid succession; this might actually be helpful in the real world in case your agents have to transcribe the thing without aid of tape recordings.
Watch as your poor enemy wastes a lot of effort trying to decode the thing. Even better, if you think that they've actually succeeded in decoding it, you can use it to sow disinformation.
All it takes is a bit of effort: one cryptographic algorithm, a creative guy or two to write bogus messages, and a bunch of people you can hire pretty cheap to read off your lists of numbers. If you're lucky, you can tie up several capable cryptographers trying to decode it, which is probably a net win. If you're really lucky, they'll succeed, buy it hook, line, and sinker, and you can start using it to give them disinformation. Sounds like a reasonable thing to try.
One of the biggest safeguards of Unix so far is: the sheer lack of uniformity. Another is (was?) it's relatively small install base. About the first point: write a linux executable, and even it you convince enough people to run it, it will fail because there is no single level of Unix installed everywhere. Some kernels will barf on it, others will refuse to execute it. And it won't work on Slowaris, SunOS, HP-(Y)UX, *AIX*, Digital Unix. So a shell script version might work (even then, program features change, as well), but that has the drawback of being readable and thereby easily recognized for what is is.
The obvious solution to these difficulties is an obfuscated PERL script. PERL is installed on a large fraction of all UNIX boxen (and even on other platforms) and has the power to do a lot of stuff. It has good cross-platform uniformit, particularly when people have various CPAN modules installed. As even its biggest detractors will admit (or maybe you could say especially its biggest detractors will insist) PERL is wonderful for writing densely incomprehensible programs that even a dedicated PERL hacker has trouble understanding. The ability to do direct damage is limited by the lack of root privileges, but then again, damaging the system prevents you from spreading effectively. Add it all up, and it's the perfect worm implementation language for UNIX.
I have actually received spam with a "copyright" notice on the bottom stating that replying, forwarding, redirecting, reposting, etc., anything from the message would constitute a violation and would be prosecuted.
You mean that you actually read your spam for longer than it took to decide to hit the delete key? What's wrong with you?
Actually, this sounds like the basis for a moderately amusing scheme. You copyright a message and then spam it to millions of people with the section mentioning that it's copyrighted and all reproduction is forbidden. When they forward your message to abuse@your.isp.com, you sue them for copyright infringement. The only problem is that a halfway intelligent defense lawyer would be able to argue that forwarding the message to the abuse authorities is fair use. So much for that plan.
ut we all know that's a bunch of crap. Most people who are downloading MP3s aren't likely to buy the album at the price that the RIAA wants to charge for it. Many of the people who download the music and decide that they would be willing to pay full price for it do so.
That means the ratio of buyers:pirates is about 12:1. That's pretty damn significant. Using this data, I would give very little credence to the fact that "most people who pirate on Napster go out and buy the album".
And that would be a devastating counterargument- if that had been the claim. But it wasn't. From an economic standpoint, the question of losses is not how many people gain unauthorized access to the work but the number of people who substitute unauthorized access for authorized access. IOW, how many people download MP3s instead of buying the CD. The RIAA wants us to believe that they're losing billions of dollars, and they make that claim based on the falacious premise that everyone who downloads MP3s is doing so instead of buying the CD. In fact, most people who download MP3s weren't seriously considering spending their money on the album anyway, and many of the people who were considering buying the album go on to do so (or already have done so) in addition to downloading.
The point is that, functionally, exchanging MP3s using Napster fulfills a role much closer to listening to the radio than it does to buying albums. People want to have a chance to listen to new songs, to listen to a new album before deciding to buy, etc., so they listen to the radio or download MP3s. When they find something they like, they still go out and buy the album. The advantage of MP3s is that you can actually pick what you want to listen to yourself instead of having to hear the same dozen songs being repeated every hour on the big radio stations.
Anybody who thinks there is a monopoloy in the music industry is seriously out of touch and needs a cluestick whopped across their head. Go to an independent music store and there are literally hundreds of different labels and 10,000's of different artists. The music industry is probably the most diverse of all mature industries in terms of the number of participants. I guess it is trendy and fashionable to label any company perceived as bad and evil as a monopoly even if it is completely baseless in reality.
This comment is at least partially valid, but there are two significant caveats. One is that the RIAA does, in fact, act as a cartel. They were recently caught red handed engaging in price fixing and had to promise not to do it again. The few biggest music companies don't completely control the market, but they do exert considerable control in a way that tends to drive prices higher than they would otherwise be.
The other aspect is that copyright law does give artists a monopoly over the sale of their products. I don't object to that, as it is the function of the copyright and serves the purpose of rewarding those artists for their work. Nonetheless, you can see the impact of those monopoly rights by comparing the price of works that are still under copyright to those that are in the public domain. Compare the prices of Bethoven albums to Metallica. Any orchestra can record Bethoven, so there's vigorous competetion and you can get anything from cheap $5 recordings to ones by the best symphonies. But those ones by great symphonies are still generally cheaper than Metallica albums, because Metallica has the right to keep anyone else from recording and selling their music.
Many will say "I buy more CD's because of Napster", the fact is that a whole lot of piracy is taking place because of Napster. It's too damn easy.
Yes, the artists are rich. Yes the record companies are sucking the artists dry. That's no reason to snag their material illegaly. If you like it, why not buy it?
This sounds good and is a nice principle, but it encounters some problems with reality. The whole RIAA argument is based on bad economics. They are, in essence, claiming that every illegal copy represents lost sales and that they would thus make X billion dollars if all of those people would just stop ripping them off.
But we all know that's a bunch of crap. Most people who are downloading MP3s aren't likely to buy the album at the price that the RIAA wants to charge for it. Many of the people who download the music and decide that they would be willing to pay full price for it do so.
This is actually the classic reason that monopolies are bad for consumers: the price for a good that maximizes profit for the monopoly results in fewer people getting the good than would receive it in a competitive market. Illegal music copying undoes some of the harm to consumers, albeit at cost to the RIAA monopoly.
1. Old games had to get by on creativity, cleverness, and playability. These days, most games are simply rehashes of older games -- same engine, different graphics.
Not that I disagree with the underlying point, but I think that there's an important thing that you're missing, here. You're fundamentally comparing the cream of the crop from the good old days with the run-of-the-mill games from today. Sure there were some really great games available back then that involved creativity, good design, and great hacking to get the most out of the system. But there were also a ton of lousy knock offs and lame brained games that were boring after you tried to play them for more than a few minutes. We just forget about the ones that sucked and remember the great ones.
I'm wondering if Microsoft will have any luck appealing the Judge's decision that IE and Windows are two seperate products. IE is software that allows users to run applications and view information formatted in HTML. How different does this sound than other features of Microsoft's OS. Sure they tested the technology outside of the OS, worked out some bugs then integrated it. That doesn't necessisarily mean it's a seperate product. If they aren't seperate products, there's no tying, and no second market they were trying to monopolize.
This sounds like a pretty good argument, but it appears that Judge Jackson has a stronger counter-argument. He quotes a couple of Supreme Court decisions that say that the question of whether two products are actually separate is dependent on the relevant market. None of the other operating systems out there claim that the browser is an essential and un-removable portion of the OS, and since there is demonstrably an interest in standalone browsers that aren't integrated into the OS. That's very strong evidence that the browser is not an integrated part of the OS, and hence that this constitutes illegal tying.
While anti-censorship forces can certainly be happy that Mattel is dumping Learning Company, they should realize that it probably has nothing whatsoever to do with CyperPatrol. The Learning Company has suffered from a number of management mistakes and bad business, which is what led to their being bought out by Mattel in the first place, and that has a lot more to do with it. It looks very much as though Mattel has simply decided that they aren't going to fix those problems, and that they really aren't getting the kind of corporate synergy (read: expanding their name into computer games) that they were hoping for. CP is probably less than 1% of their reason for doing this.
Some other criteria I've seen people use as requirements for passwords:
Must contain upper and lower case letters.
Must contain non-letter characters.
Adding in those two requirements greatly enlarges the potential pool of passwords. Even if you assume only numbers will be used in addition to letters and not all the punctuation marks, you're still increasing your password base by several orders of magnitude. Requiring non-letter characters also means that simple dictionary attacks are bound to fail. Furthermore, those are all very simple requirements that are easy to check- unlike matching against the whole dictionary.
Similarly, we can now move on to the next step in understanding biological creatures - trying to figure out what all of the proteins do, and how the systems built from them operate and interact with other such systems.
This would not be an easy task under the best of circumstances. It's made worse by the fact that evolution puts little value on modularity - the systems will interact with each other to such a degree that it will be difficult to even define individual systems within the chaos that is an evolved being.
Fortunately, things aren't quite as bleak as you portray them. Many, many proteins do in fact have a single, clearly defined primary function, either by themselves or as part of a larger complex. Those proteins can have their function inferred either by watching them catalyze reactions, deleting them and seeing how it affects celluar function, or comparing them to similar proteins from the same or other species.
More promisingly, new techniques of functional genomics and proteomics are being developed to analyze protein function by looking at more subtle factors. To find the function of a protein of unknown function, you can find out what other proteins it interacts with and infer what role it plays. You can also grow cells or organisms under different conditions and look for changes in levels of gene or protein expression to determine what proteins are associated with specific metabolic or other life states. Some very interesting work is also being done by determining the 3D structure of proteins (either by analysis or simulation) and predicting function based on structure.
The tools for the next big thing are out there. It's just a matter of going through the long grind of applying them. It's going to be a very long road, probably much longer than the process of sequencing the genome, but finding out (to a rough and ready approximation, at least) what every protein does is an accomplishable goal.
Countries who care what the US is up to always know when something important is about to happen, because the number of late-night pizzas delivered to offices at the Pentagon and State Department skyrockets.
It doesn't seem too covert, though. After all, the spy school instructors knew all about it and it was a common joke throughout the US intelligence community.
This actually sounds like just a special case of traffic analysis. Traffic analysis is one thing that you can do if you can intercept but not decrypt your enemy's transmissions. When his signal traffic increases suddenly, you know something is up.
If you really want to be paranoid about signal security, you have to send out a background of boring messages at least as big as your expected peak traffic. You could, for instance, send out messages that said "Ignore me" padded with whitespace (and then encrypted) at periodic intervals. When you actually want to send a real message, you'd substitute your real message for one of the fake ones. Of course this is something that computers are very good for; they can mimic the length patterns of real messages and automatically ignore the bogus received messages.
By analogy, the State and Defense departments could constantly order late night pizzas even when nothing interesting was going on. A more practical alternative would be to have a supply of frozen pizzas and an oven, or even an in-house pizzeria. Sounds like a good excuse to me.
Assuming that we had to
a) protect the rights of the content creators to make a FAIR buck from their movies. This would be mainly implemented by preventing mass quantities of content from being made WITHOUT paying royalties to the original content creator. b) Allow owners of media who HAD paid proper royalties to view the content on THEIR choice of dedicated players, computer systems, hand-held devices, or anything else that technology could come up with.
Very simply- don't try a technological solution, try a legal one. Don't put any kind of anti-copying gizmo into the media being distibuted.
Instead, put effort into tracking down people who are illegally attempting to copy the information we want to protect. Build a super-duper web crawler that looks for bootleg movie sites. This shouldn't be too tough. For a web-site to support an economically meaningful level of bootleg copying, it would have to have hundreds of GB of traffic per day, and that cuts down on the number of sites to look at drastically. When you find one, use your existing rights under copyright law to nail the perpetrators. Track down illegal copying rings that sell bootlegged physical copies. When you find the people, prosecute them to the full extent of the law.
In general, wait until after somebody breaks the law before punishing him. Customers should be presumed innocent until proven guilty. When they're found to be guilty of copying illegally, go ahead and nail them to the wall. But give them a chance to obey the law before you take away their rights.
Far, far better to have a law that states that technical means for securing copyrights must not infringe your right of fair use. Keeping your rights is much better than stripping them of theirs. The alternative is giving government the power to remove rights on a whim. They are not called rights for nothing.
This sounds good, but it's going to be hard to implement. The problem is that fair use rights a) are very broad and b) can only be determined legally after the fact.
Take criticism as a good example of a). It's generally accepted that it's acceptable to use short excerpts from a copyrighted work as part of criticism of that work. The video reviewer on your local TV station can include clips from the video he's reviewing under fair use. But how long is reasonable for critical purposes? If you let people copy short clips, how long will it be before someone creates a utility that cuts the movie into clips of the decided upon length, copies them, and pastes them back together to create a non-protected version of the movie?
More problematic, IMO, is that fair use is subjective and decided by judges after the fact. The key example here is Parody. Parodies have been ruled by the Supreme Court to be a form of criticism, and hence fair use. Furthermore, that decision stated that the parody must be allowed to use enough material from the original to be an obvious parody. The question then is how much copying is allowed. Is it OK to make a "parody" of The Matrix which uses the complete original footage but a replacement humorous sound track? How about taking the original sound track and using it with new, homemade footage? How about cutting out the individual scenes and pasting them together in a new order? All of these things might be protected fair use, and it would be up to a judge to decide. How in hell can you create software that is smart enough to tell if what you want to do is fair use, lets you do it if it is, and is still capable of preventing comparatively easy illegal copying?
Otherwise, publishers will use access controls to rewrite the copyright laws, without an act of Congress.
This is actually a very important point that has been made before. A particularly good example of this is copyright expiration (though the current trend suggests that you shouldn't count on any copyright exiring any time in your life). Suppose, for instance, that a movie studio releases a DVD version of a very old movie that is no longer under copyright. They should have no right to control your ability to copy it, since it's now in the public domain. But if they release it as a DVD they still get protection. Why? Because you can't legally remove the DVD copy protection; any tool that can remove it from a public domain work can also remove it from a copyrighted work, and hence is illegal. The result is that your rights have been curtailed without you being able to do anything about it.
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I suspect that MS-AP will wind up keeping the Microsoft name, and MS-OS will wind up being called "The Windows Operating System Company" or some similar name. This would make sense because MS-OS is going to remain a much more tightly focused company with a single, well known trademark. Thus it makes sense to leverage that trademark as a new company name and let the more diverse MS-AP keep the (also very well known) Microsoft moniker.
A reasonable and educated person might very well claim that this is not at all ironic- it's the expected result. Monopolies in general tend not to be innovative- they focus on protecting their monopoly and sucking up buyers' cash rather than developing better products. Microsoft's hardware division actually has to compete with other companies for business, so it has to provide products that are good enough to convince people to buy them instead of the competetion.
My favorite bit was from just before this quote:
IOW, "I can't believe that you weren't prepared for the government to ask for a breakup, and if you weren't it's your own fault anyway."
Actually no. The details of the judgment are a bit more sane than this. Microsoft may degrade the performance of middleware provided that it tells vendors in advance and lets them know what they can do to minimize the damage. IOW, if they come up with a replacment API that improves things, they can comply with the judgment by publicizing it and giving ISVs a chance to change their products before pulling the old one.
Actually, I've noticed that some ISP's have started to include a X-trace line in headers. This includes the exact time, IP address, phone number, etc. that the spammer was using when putting the spam into the system. I've only seen it in USENET postings, but that's because I haven't actually spent any time carefully going over headers on e-mail spam. It should make it very easy to trace, though.
Not that I disagree with the basic notion that the internet should remain free, but free speech has never been absolute and unfettered. Libel, copyright violation, broadcasting military secrets, and the like have never been protected. And well that some forms of speech shouldn't be protected. After all, those DoS packets could be considered a form of free speech and we want them silenced!
Every time that hyperlibertarians support grossly illegal behavior, like massive copyright violation, under the mantle of free speech, it gives the authoritarians who want to shut down all unapproved speech more ammunition. Free speech is important, but it shouldn't be used as a cover for violating other peoples' rights.
For one of those great IBM Linux on System/390 setups. You have a situation where you want a combination of:
Given that the telco is a government monopoly, you can bet that they'll be happy to do whatever the politicians tell them to. Phone over IP may well be viewed positively. It's theoretically more efficient, which may wind up saving the government money- definitely a good thing.
Costa Rica is a considerable anomaly among the countries in Latin America. Costa Rica has cleverly avoided the military coups that have been the scourge of much of the rest of Latin America by not having a strong military. They've then taken the savings and plowed a lot of it into social programs. The combination of stable government and good social progams has made Costa Rica about the most successful country in Latin America. Free internet access is just a continuation of the general trend toward enlightened government.
This list is a bit misleading. You'll notice that they give a BSD(aggr) and Linux(aggr). That means that they're lumping together all flavors of BSD into a single category, and all Linux distributions into a single category (although they do count an exploit only once if it appears in multiple distros).
That means that if RedHat has vulnerability A but not B or C, Suse has vulnerability B but not A or C, and Debian has vulnerability C but not A or B, Linux(aggr) is counted as having three exploits. In reality, if you're using just one distribution you'll only experience one of the three, and Slackware might not have any of those exploits.
The following looks a lot more favorable for Linux:
OS 97 98 99 00
Debian 2 2 29 5
RedHat 5 10 38 17
Slackware 3 8 10 0
Suse 0 0 21 5
Win NT 4 6 99 37
Technically speaking, it was Agilent that did the new mouse. Microsoft apparently doesn't have an exclusive purchasing arrangement with them so other manufacturers could (and soon will) make them.
Of course that could be the goal. If you really want to mess with the other guys, you could use a scheme like this to do it. The process would be pretty simple:
All it takes is a bit of effort: one cryptographic algorithm, a creative guy or two to write bogus messages, and a bunch of people you can hire pretty cheap to read off your lists of numbers. If you're lucky, you can tie up several capable cryptographers trying to decode it, which is probably a net win. If you're really lucky, they'll succeed, buy it hook, line, and sinker, and you can start using it to give them disinformation. Sounds like a reasonable thing to try.
The obvious solution to these difficulties is an obfuscated PERL script. PERL is installed on a large fraction of all UNIX boxen (and even on other platforms) and has the power to do a lot of stuff. It has good cross-platform uniformit, particularly when people have various CPAN modules installed. As even its biggest detractors will admit (or maybe you could say especially its biggest detractors will insist) PERL is wonderful for writing densely incomprehensible programs that even a dedicated PERL hacker has trouble understanding. The ability to do direct damage is limited by the lack of root privileges, but then again, damaging the system prevents you from spreading effectively. Add it all up, and it's the perfect worm implementation language for UNIX.
You mean that you actually read your spam for longer than it took to decide to hit the delete key? What's wrong with you?
Actually, this sounds like the basis for a moderately amusing scheme. You copyright a message and then spam it to millions of people with the section mentioning that it's copyrighted and all reproduction is forbidden. When they forward your message to abuse@your.isp.com, you sue them for copyright infringement. The only problem is that a halfway intelligent defense lawyer would be able to argue that forwarding the message to the abuse authorities is fair use. So much for that plan.
And that would be a devastating counterargument- if that had been the claim. But it wasn't. From an economic standpoint, the question of losses is not how many people gain unauthorized access to the work but the number of people who substitute unauthorized access for authorized access. IOW, how many people download MP3s instead of buying the CD. The RIAA wants us to believe that they're losing billions of dollars, and they make that claim based on the falacious premise that everyone who downloads MP3s is doing so instead of buying the CD. In fact, most people who download MP3s weren't seriously considering spending their money on the album anyway, and many of the people who were considering buying the album go on to do so (or already have done so) in addition to downloading.
The point is that, functionally, exchanging MP3s using Napster fulfills a role much closer to listening to the radio than it does to buying albums. People want to have a chance to listen to new songs, to listen to a new album before deciding to buy, etc., so they listen to the radio or download MP3s. When they find something they like, they still go out and buy the album. The advantage of MP3s is that you can actually pick what you want to listen to yourself instead of having to hear the same dozen songs being repeated every hour on the big radio stations.
This comment is at least partially valid, but there are two significant caveats. One is that the RIAA does, in fact, act as a cartel. They were recently caught red handed engaging in price fixing and had to promise not to do it again. The few biggest music companies don't completely control the market, but they do exert considerable control in a way that tends to drive prices higher than they would otherwise be.
The other aspect is that copyright law does give artists a monopoly over the sale of their products. I don't object to that, as it is the function of the copyright and serves the purpose of rewarding those artists for their work. Nonetheless, you can see the impact of those monopoly rights by comparing the price of works that are still under copyright to those that are in the public domain. Compare the prices of Bethoven albums to Metallica. Any orchestra can record Bethoven, so there's vigorous competetion and you can get anything from cheap $5 recordings to ones by the best symphonies. But those ones by great symphonies are still generally cheaper than Metallica albums, because Metallica has the right to keep anyone else from recording and selling their music.
This sounds good and is a nice principle, but it encounters some problems with reality. The whole RIAA argument is based on bad economics. They are, in essence, claiming that every illegal copy represents lost sales and that they would thus make X billion dollars if all of those people would just stop ripping them off.
But we all know that's a bunch of crap. Most people who are downloading MP3s aren't likely to buy the album at the price that the RIAA wants to charge for it. Many of the people who download the music and decide that they would be willing to pay full price for it do so.
This is actually the classic reason that monopolies are bad for consumers: the price for a good that maximizes profit for the monopoly results in fewer people getting the good than would receive it in a competitive market. Illegal music copying undoes some of the harm to consumers, albeit at cost to the RIAA monopoly.
Not that I disagree with the underlying point, but I think that there's an important thing that you're missing, here. You're fundamentally comparing the cream of the crop from the good old days with the run-of-the-mill games from today. Sure there were some really great games available back then that involved creativity, good design, and great hacking to get the most out of the system. But there were also a ton of lousy knock offs and lame brained games that were boring after you tried to play them for more than a few minutes. We just forget about the ones that sucked and remember the great ones.
This sounds like a pretty good argument, but it appears that Judge Jackson has a stronger counter-argument. He quotes a couple of Supreme Court decisions that say that the question of whether two products are actually separate is dependent on the relevant market. None of the other operating systems out there claim that the browser is an essential and un-removable portion of the OS, and since there is demonstrably an interest in standalone browsers that aren't integrated into the OS. That's very strong evidence that the browser is not an integrated part of the OS, and hence that this constitutes illegal tying.
While anti-censorship forces can certainly be happy that Mattel is dumping Learning Company, they should realize that it probably has nothing whatsoever to do with CyperPatrol. The Learning Company has suffered from a number of management mistakes and bad business, which is what led to their being bought out by Mattel in the first place, and that has a lot more to do with it. It looks very much as though Mattel has simply decided that they aren't going to fix those problems, and that they really aren't getting the kind of corporate synergy (read: expanding their name into computer games) that they were hoping for. CP is probably less than 1% of their reason for doing this.
Some other criteria I've seen people use as requirements for passwords:
Adding in those two requirements greatly enlarges the potential pool of passwords. Even if you assume only numbers will be used in addition to letters and not all the punctuation marks, you're still increasing your password base by several orders of magnitude. Requiring non-letter characters also means that simple dictionary attacks are bound to fail. Furthermore, those are all very simple requirements that are easy to check- unlike matching against the whole dictionary.
Fortunately, things aren't quite as bleak as you portray them. Many, many proteins do in fact have a single, clearly defined primary function, either by themselves or as part of a larger complex. Those proteins can have their function inferred either by watching them catalyze reactions, deleting them and seeing how it affects celluar function, or comparing them to similar proteins from the same or other species.
More promisingly, new techniques of functional genomics and proteomics are being developed to analyze protein function by looking at more subtle factors. To find the function of a protein of unknown function, you can find out what other proteins it interacts with and infer what role it plays. You can also grow cells or organisms under different conditions and look for changes in levels of gene or protein expression to determine what proteins are associated with specific metabolic or other life states. Some very interesting work is also being done by determining the 3D structure of proteins (either by analysis or simulation) and predicting function based on structure.
The tools for the next big thing are out there. It's just a matter of going through the long grind of applying them. It's going to be a very long road, probably much longer than the process of sequencing the genome, but finding out (to a rough and ready approximation, at least) what every protein does is an accomplishable goal.
This actually sounds like just a special case of traffic analysis. Traffic analysis is one thing that you can do if you can intercept but not decrypt your enemy's transmissions. When his signal traffic increases suddenly, you know something is up.
If you really want to be paranoid about signal security, you have to send out a background of boring messages at least as big as your expected peak traffic. You could, for instance, send out messages that said "Ignore me" padded with whitespace (and then encrypted) at periodic intervals. When you actually want to send a real message, you'd substitute your real message for one of the fake ones. Of course this is something that computers are very good for; they can mimic the length patterns of real messages and automatically ignore the bogus received messages.
By analogy, the State and Defense departments could constantly order late night pizzas even when nothing interesting was going on. A more practical alternative would be to have a supply of frozen pizzas and an oven, or even an in-house pizzeria. Sounds like a good excuse to me.
Very simply- don't try a technological solution, try a legal one. Don't put any kind of anti-copying gizmo into the media being distibuted.
Instead, put effort into tracking down people who are illegally attempting to copy the information we want to protect. Build a super-duper web crawler that looks for bootleg movie sites. This shouldn't be too tough. For a web-site to support an economically meaningful level of bootleg copying, it would have to have hundreds of GB of traffic per day, and that cuts down on the number of sites to look at drastically. When you find one, use your existing rights under copyright law to nail the perpetrators. Track down illegal copying rings that sell bootlegged physical copies. When you find the people, prosecute them to the full extent of the law.
In general, wait until after somebody breaks the law before punishing him. Customers should be presumed innocent until proven guilty. When they're found to be guilty of copying illegally, go ahead and nail them to the wall. But give them a chance to obey the law before you take away their rights.
This sounds good, but it's going to be hard to implement. The problem is that fair use rights a) are very broad and b) can only be determined legally after the fact.
Take criticism as a good example of a). It's generally accepted that it's acceptable to use short excerpts from a copyrighted work as part of criticism of that work. The video reviewer on your local TV station can include clips from the video he's reviewing under fair use. But how long is reasonable for critical purposes? If you let people copy short clips, how long will it be before someone creates a utility that cuts the movie into clips of the decided upon length, copies them, and pastes them back together to create a non-protected version of the movie?
More problematic, IMO, is that fair use is subjective and decided by judges after the fact. The key example here is Parody. Parodies have been ruled by the Supreme Court to be a form of criticism, and hence fair use. Furthermore, that decision stated that the parody must be allowed to use enough material from the original to be an obvious parody. The question then is how much copying is allowed. Is it OK to make a "parody" of The Matrix which uses the complete original footage but a replacement humorous sound track? How about taking the original sound track and using it with new, homemade footage? How about cutting out the individual scenes and pasting them together in a new order? All of these things might be protected fair use, and it would be up to a judge to decide. How in hell can you create software that is smart enough to tell if what you want to do is fair use, lets you do it if it is, and is still capable of preventing comparatively easy illegal copying?
This is actually a very important point that has been made before. A particularly good example of this is copyright expiration (though the current trend suggests that you shouldn't count on any copyright exiring any time in your life). Suppose, for instance, that a movie studio releases a DVD version of a very old movie that is no longer under copyright. They should have no right to control your ability to copy it, since it's now in the public domain. But if they release it as a DVD they still get protection. Why? Because you can't legally remove the DVD copy protection; any tool that can remove it from a public domain work can also remove it from a copyrighted work, and hence is illegal. The result is that your rights have been curtailed without you being able to do anything about it.