But I also think it's impossible to control mass distribution of media now. And any attempts to go after Gnutella (a true file-sharing utility just like anonymous FTP) will be fruitless.
Why do people keep saying this? Are they just trying to convince themselves? I keep hearing this fact spouted from various people, repeatedly and without evidence. Writing a program for an ISP that watches for certain protocols coming off of connections, and shuts down those connections when the protocols are spotted, is (within my guess of course) a one month project for a good programming team. No matter what you are sending over the internet, the IP header has an IP address that can eventually be trailed back to you.
This is just a small example of the simple fact that anything that repeats itself by some system can be sabotaged, exploited or tracked in some way. Any person who has a habit, system that uses a common channel or the same method over time, or orginization that reacts the same way to all threats, can be attacked on the basis of that regularity. It's the foundation of electronic espionage. It is why defense is harder than offense. It is why your 'invisible' file swapping methods, once widely used enough to be a blip on the radar, can be tracked.
Is there a 'quantum computer emulator' anywhere on the net? I know that it wouldn't have any of the advantages of a quantum computer, but it would be nice to fiddle around with it, and have it tell me, "This process used 10,521,982 cycles. On a actual quantum computer it would have only used 4,042." After all, got to stay ahead of current trends.
What, nobody's responded to this yet? Most of you are reading this on a computer - a general purpose computer. Much like this robot is, or can someday be, a general purpose robot.
An articulated arm is overkill for this job, but work in this area paves the way for flexible robots that can do many things. This robot was formerly a car factory robot. The more articulated arm robots you make, the cheaper each is. The cheaper each is, the more likely that the general purpose robot ends up being cheaper than the special purpose hamburger maker.
Furthermore, should the whole country go vegeterian (yuck), then your general purpose robot resells a lot better than your hamburger maker.
I think given Microsoft's efforts to break the Kerbeos standard is the last straw, and the company should be broken up, forced to release thier broken-arse source code.
People forget, however, that most of the people who work at Microsoft are behind the times and still think that they are the good guys. I think that a protest would indicate how the DoJ, the Judge, the States, and most of the rest of the world feel about them.
So, Commander Taco, when do you want your traffic deadlock at Redmond?
At 2000$ a card, I doubt they are going to need a landfill anytime soon. And I doubt the cards will be "scattered" - they'll probably be in some kind of hard shell, so some Loonie a hundred years from now can dump out the cards into a bio-recycler and turn the shell into a water tank.
The classic quote from the Mythical Man Month about this is:
Write one to throw away. You will anyhow.
I've been doing some work under Windows with threads, and I tried to start by designing a generalized class-based thread model before dropping in my first thread. It didn't work - I had no idea what I needed or how to bring it about.
So I dove in and wrote something more Cish. Five threads later, I know what should go into a class - it's the code that I keep cutting and ******* pasting. I now know how to encapsulate the functionality I need, smoothly, because I know exactly what it needs to do and a functional way to go about doing it.
I think that various commercial websites have figured out ways around deep linking, anyway. You just, via perl script or something, rename the deeper pages every day or so, but also rename the links within the pages, so the site links together as before, but only the front page retains a persistant name. Hey, TicketMaster! For half of what you're paying your lawyers I'll save you from that mean ol' tickets.com.
Uh, yeah.
"various commerical websites". Not that I patronize these web sites, you understand. They just tend to be at the forefront of, uh, 'agressive html design'.
I believe that most musicians would like to escape the record companies and move to online distribution. I believe this has not happened because making money distributing music online, and making money doing it, is not a trivial thing to do, even assuming you have computer knowledge.
I believe that a partial solution to this quandary is to make a new file format with two parts:
One or More Payment stubs, like so:
PaymentType: e-gold
AccountNumber: {an account number}
AmountPerPlay: 0.0001 oz
Music or Video in a standard format.
Each time the song is played, a transaction is made. Actually, the transactions would probably be queued so you could check how much you were paying, then click the pay button. (to make sure that the band isn't charging 100$ a play.)
Of course, you'd have to have a music player that was capable of handling a couple of widespread payment methods. E-gold has been around for a while, and you could actually charge less than a cent - much less than a cent - per play. But just like most players support many audio formats, they could support many payment mechanisms along the same lines. Good thing us open source people are pretty good at quick-deployment modular code, huh?
You could have a zip file inside the format, and just pay one lump sum when you unzip the file.
Could people bypass the format and play the music without paying? Of course. Theft has and always will be a factor. But that's not the point. The point is, there will be people who want to pay (I do!), and these people will have a very easy way to give a musician money.
I had this crazy thought about half a year ago. When the economy is running high, there are plenty of jobs about and few individuals of high qualifications seek out a teaching position. Thus, the teachers are less qualified, less talented, and less skilled, and produce a lower quality of students, thus lowering the national level of education.
Suddenly, the nation is run by this low quality batch of graduates. I can't think of anything more likely to cause a recession than stupid management. So, we divebomb into poverty, the market crashes, and jobs become scarce. A teaching job is suddenly a treasure - it's one of the few jobs available! The most qualified people get them, producing an excellent flock of graduates, who bring the country out of recession....
Slashdot Mirror
But I also think it's impossible to control mass distribution of media now. And any attempts to go after Gnutella (a true file-sharing utility just like anonymous FTP) will be fruitless.
Why do people keep saying this? Are they just trying to convince themselves? I keep hearing this fact spouted from various people, repeatedly and without evidence. Writing a program for an ISP that watches for certain protocols coming off of connections, and shuts down those connections when the protocols are spotted, is (within my guess of course) a one month project for a good programming team. No matter what you are sending over the internet, the IP header has an IP address that can eventually be trailed back to you.
This is just a small example of the simple fact that anything that repeats itself by some system can be sabotaged, exploited or tracked in some way. Any person who has a habit, system that uses a common channel or the same method over time, or orginization that reacts the same way to all threats, can be attacked on the basis of that regularity. It's the foundation of electronic espionage. It is why defense is harder than offense. It is why your 'invisible' file swapping methods, once widely used enough to be a blip on the radar, can be tracked.
Is there a 'quantum computer emulator' anywhere on the net? I know that it wouldn't have any of the advantages of a quantum computer, but it would be nice to fiddle around with it, and have it tell me, "This process used 10,521,982 cycles. On a actual quantum computer it would have only used 4,042." After all, got to stay ahead of current trends.
What, nobody's responded to this yet? Most of you are reading this on a computer - a general purpose computer. Much like this robot is, or can someday be, a general purpose robot.
An articulated arm is overkill for this job, but work in this area paves the way for flexible robots that can do many things. This robot was formerly a car factory robot. The more articulated arm robots you make, the cheaper each is. The cheaper each is, the more likely that the general purpose robot ends up being cheaper than the special purpose hamburger maker.
Furthermore, should the whole country go vegeterian (yuck), then your general purpose robot resells a lot better than your hamburger maker.
I think given Microsoft's efforts to break the Kerbeos standard is the last straw, and the company should be broken up, forced to release thier broken-arse source code.
People forget, however, that most of the people who work at Microsoft are behind the times and still think that they are the good guys. I think that a protest would indicate how the DoJ, the Judge, the States, and most of the rest of the world feel about them.
So, Commander Taco, when do you want your traffic deadlock at Redmond?
At 2000$ a card, I doubt they are going to need a landfill anytime soon. And I doubt the cards will be "scattered" - they'll probably be in some kind of hard shell, so some Loonie a hundred years from now can dump out the cards into a bio-recycler and turn the shell into a water tank.
How do you feel about the fact that the record companies net almost all of the profit music makes, and the artists get very little?
The classic quote from the Mythical Man Month about this is:
Write one to throw away. You will anyhow.
I've been doing some work under Windows with threads, and I tried to start by designing a generalized class-based thread model before dropping in my first thread. It didn't work - I had no idea what I needed or how to bring it about.
So I dove in and wrote something more Cish. Five threads later, I know what should go into a class - it's the code that I keep cutting and ******* pasting. I now know how to encapsulate the functionality I need, smoothly, because I know exactly what it needs to do and a functional way to go about doing it.
I think that various commercial websites have figured out ways around deep linking, anyway. You just, via perl script or something, rename the deeper pages every day or so, but also rename the links within the pages, so the site links together as before, but only the front page retains a persistant name. Hey, TicketMaster! For half of what you're paying your lawyers I'll save you from that mean ol' tickets.com.
Uh, yeah.
"various commerical websites". Not that I patronize these web sites, you understand. They just tend to be at the forefront of, uh, 'agressive html design'.
The dollar figure stated in the brief was 50 million. Isn't that chump change for a US government military contract, especially one of this magnitude?
I believe that most musicians would like to escape the record companies and move to online distribution. I believe this has not happened because making money distributing music online, and making money doing it, is not a trivial thing to do, even assuming you have computer knowledge.
I believe that a partial solution to this quandary is to make a new file format with two parts:
Each time the song is played, a transaction is made. Actually, the transactions would probably be queued so you could check how much you were paying, then click the pay button. (to make sure that the band isn't charging 100$ a play.)
Of course, you'd have to have a music player that was capable of handling a couple of widespread payment methods. E-gold has been around for a while, and you could actually charge less than a cent - much less than a cent - per play. But just like most players support many audio formats, they could support many payment mechanisms along the same lines. Good thing us open source people are pretty good at quick-deployment modular code, huh?
You could have a zip file inside the format, and just pay one lump sum when you unzip the file.
Could people bypass the format and play the music without paying? Of course. Theft has and always will be a factor. But that's not the point. The point is, there will be people who want to pay (I do!), and these people will have a very easy way to give a musician money.
linux is easy to use. the pointy end goes in the other guy.
I had this crazy thought about half a year ago. When the economy is running high, there are plenty of jobs about and few individuals of high qualifications seek out a teaching position. Thus, the teachers are less qualified, less talented, and less skilled, and produce a lower quality of students, thus lowering the national level of education.
Suddenly, the nation is run by this low quality batch of graduates. I can't think of anything more likely to cause a recession than stupid management. So, we divebomb into poverty, the market crashes, and jobs become scarce. A teaching job is suddenly a treasure - it's one of the few jobs available! The most qualified people get them, producing an excellent flock of graduates, who bring the country out of recession....
Cycles.
Gotta love em.