[J&J] have no trademark rights except on those medical devices, and those trademark rights don't take away anyone else's rights to use the symbol And, if you had RTFA, that's just what J&J is suing ARC over -- the use of the Red Cross mark on exactly those medical devices for which it has the trademark. Sorry, but ARC is in the wrong here and are blatantly flouting their contractual agreements with J&J
Don't fall in to the trap of assuming that because J&J is a for-profit corporation it is automatically evil, and that because ARC is non-profit they are automatically as pure as the driven snow. As corporations go, J&J is far from the worst. And while the ARC does do a lot of good things, they have a lot of problems, too. While they like to tout that they "only" have 9% overhead, that conveniently ignores a lot of highly questionable "relief" expenditures (EG massive overpayments to preferred vendors). And when it comes to generating revenue and defending their turf, ARC is just as vicious and underhanded as any big for-profit corporation.
There is no such thing as "tamper proof". The best you can ever hope for is "tamper evident" and "tamper resistant".
Nothing in the world can protect you against a corrupt system administrator. Even a "two man rule" won't help you if they're working together to beat the system.
If you're serious about information security, read The Orange Book.
The only way I can see to collect valid net-wide statistics would be to collect them from a random sampling of routers at various ISPs. Just looking at the backbone routers would miss all the traffic handled by private peering relationships.
the right security protocol There is no "right" security protocol for DRM. It's a pipe dream. It's impossible.
You can't lock down hardware that's not under your direct physical control. If you've got the player and the disk you've got everything you need to decrypt the content. It is, by definition, an insecure cryptosystem. You can add as many layers of obfuscation as you want and you still haven't solved the problem that THE USER HAS ALL THE PIECES.
The most you can possibly do is to make it hard enough that it takes an engineer with a bench full of test equipment to crack it, instead of a bright 14 year old with a PC and a debugger. That excludes 99.99% of the population, but it still leaves tens of thousands of people who have the tools and the skills needed -- and it only takes one of them to subvert the system, as DVD Jon has demonstrated.
So you've got a virtual machine. Big deal. Someone will reverse-engineer your VM so that it works the way THEY want it to instead of the way YOU want it to.
I love getting hot stock tips a couple months late. I look them up to see how much the pump-n-dump moved the stock. Most of the time the original delivery date has the stock at near peak and rising. The spammer is already dumping on the rise. You get in right at the time to see the peak and the sell-off on the way back down. I've often wondered if you could reliably make money by shorting pump-and-dump stocks. I keep meaning to write a perl script to track themm and do a simulation, but I never seem to have enough time to do it. Maybe if I could overcome my/. addiction...
Catholic churches are an El Dorado for paedophiles and predators who want to harm young people. My opinion is that that it's more to the point to say that the Catholic priesthood and monastic orders are a haven for sexually aberrant and dysfunctional individuals. IMHO only someone who has major issues with their own sexuality is going to voluntarily take a vow of lifelong celibacy. There won't be any meaningful reform until the institutions have a population of people with a healthy outlook on sex, and that won't happen until the Church allows priests, monks, and nuns to marry.
C++ is a strict superset of C. A C++ compiler will accept any valid C program as input. (Or least this was the case 10+ years ago, which was the last time I wrote any C++ code)
Furthermore, any C++ code can be algorithmically decomposed into C. Recall that Stroustrup initially implemented C++ as a preprocessor (written in C) which fed it's output to a C compiler. (same caveat applies)
I've maintained a lot of "C++" code where the only thing that distinguished it from straight C was the use of cout and//, and even more "OO" code that had classes which did nothing more than wrap a C function or two. In my experience, there are a lot more programs like this in the real world than there are "proper" object-oriented C++ programs. YMMV.
.
IMHO, because of these facts C++ should more properly be considered an extension of C and not a distinct language in it's own right. I'm sure many people will disagree with me, probably even Bjarne himself. I admit that it's a pretty fine distinction, however, and arguing about it is almost as pointless as debating whether vi is better than emacs. (it is)
If you object to the C/C++ notation (which is pretty widely used throughout the industry, it's not something I just pulled out of my ass one day), you can mentally transform it into
1,2,3: Most of the other real estate in this solar system sucks. Mars might be terraformable at some date in the far future, and self-sustaining sealed ecosystems on the moon or large asteroids might also become possible at some point. Still not prime real estate by any stretch of the imagination. Possible to do: conceptually, yes, but not with current technology. Feasible is fuzzy... it depends on what the alternatives are. Same thing goes for extra-solar settlement.
4: Better alternative? No, especially not in our lifetimes. But it is still eventually necessary for the long-term survival of the human species. An extinction-level meteor impact WILL eventually happen (and has happened twice before), and even if we manage to avoid that the sun will eventually either go nova or burn out into a brown dwarf. But the fact that it's not an immediate necessity doesn't mean that we shouldn't start trying now. The time to move out of Pompey is BEFORE Vesuvius erupts... once you see the smoke, it's already too late.
5, 6, 7: You're reading your own biases into the GP post. I don't think anyone here is saying any of those things. We need to make this planet last as long as we can, so that we have time to advance far enough that we can seed other ones.
It's pointless to think about moving all of the human race to another planet; and even if it were possible, human nature is such that most people wouldn't leave even in the face of an impending catastrophe. At most we can do is provide the opportunity for a tiny percentage to migrate elsewhere and start breeding.
I could go on, but Heinlein does a better job of making this argument in several of his novels (Time Enough For Love in particular).
Re:Emphasis on the light, please.
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Vertical Farming
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Very interesting post. Can you suggest any resources (online or print) that would serve as a starting point for a greenhouse n00b?
By actively filtering content, I would think that AT&T would be giving up it's legal protection as a common carrier and the safe harbor protection that status gives them under DMCA and other copyright laws.
It may make the copyright cartels happy, but I think it'll be opening up a whole lot of other liability issues.
But most programs would be better off written in some other language, like Python or Perl
This needs to be repeated loudly and often. C/C++ is a great language, but there are only a very few instances where you really need to use it. C/C++ is optimized for making efficient use of hardware resources, CPU and memory in particular. On modern hardware, this is seldom the limiting factor -- you are far more likely to be constrained by I/O (network bandwidth / latency, database queries, etc). If you really need that kind of low-level control or cpu optimization, it's usually isolated to few critical functions -- the majority of the work that wraps those functions is better handled by a higher-level language. Writing an entire application end-to-end in C/C++ is usually a mistake
More importantly, most projects are constrained by PROGRAMMER TIME. A language that optimizes programmer efficiency rather than hardware efficiency provides a bigger benefit for the vast majority of development projects. Why write 100 lines of C or Java code when you can accomplish the same task with 10 or fewer lines of Perl, Python, or Ruby? Programmer productivity really soars when you have an easy-to-use repository of pre-written code modules like CPAN.
New people discover filesharing every day and how would they know about this ruling?
The same way they discovered filesharing in the first place -- word of mouth.
People who have the technical know how will get around the blocks. The problem is that the masses don't have access or knowledge of those technologies. Access to knowledge of those technologies can be controlled. Here in America the "main stream media" is really just a group of a couple of very large media conglomorates who control what the public thinks is "news". The same thing is threatening to happen to the Internet. Companies like Google, Yahoo! and MSN are the Rupurt Murdocks et al of the online world.
People with the technical knowledge will create the tools to get around the blocks. Everyone else will learn about them by word of mouth, download them, and use them. It makes no difference to them that they have no clue about how the technology actually works.
The whole Napster/p2p saga is the perfect rebuttal to your argument. The giant media conglomerates killed off Napster. Did that stop people from sharing music? Nope, you just got a huge proliferation of new and better p2p file sharing tools that are more resistant to the MAFIAA's shutdown tactics.
If AT&T and the other big carriers control the major pipes, new ones will spring up that aren't under their control. Wireless technology is improving and becoming more affordable on a daily basis, ad-hoc municipal networks are already a reality. If the commercial internet went away tomorrow, how long do you think it would take geeks to set up a Fidonet style network based on modern wireless technology? Days? Hours? It wouldn't take long, and it wouldn't take much longer than that for the non-geek population to join in.
Sadly, I think yours is the better explanation. That's the reason that when the Beatles' box was released it was outselling the modern "artists" by a wide margin.
Oh, there will be a business model and an arms race, supplying tunnels and proxies to work around matters.
And the states that are censoring will have the truth used upon them in the suppository fashion.
Exactly. Google, Yahoo! and MSN are not the entire internet. There are other search engines, other portals, other content providers. Even if all the major players kowtow to repressive governments in order to do business in those countries, there will still be billions of groups and individuals who aren't motivated by greed and/or fear.
Keyword filtering can be defeated by SSL or by using alternate encodings (EG base64/rot13/etc content that gets transparently decoded via javascript on the client browser). DNS and IP level blocking can be defeated with proxies, remailers, IM bots, etc. People will always find a way around content blocks faster than those blocks can adapt.
I realize that I probably shouldn't assemble CDs of fun songs for my nephew's birthday and it's out of the realm of fair use technically As far as I know, this is still legal fair use. IIRC, under the Betamax Decision, you have the fair use right to shift format for content you legally own. Your compilation CD is legal for you to use, and it's probably legal for you to give it to any member of your household.
Do you have proof of concept code? If not, pardon me if I'm a bit skeptical.
You might be able to do this, but I have doubts that you could do so without visibly distorting / corrupting the image.
I mean would you really spend your free time making a video for a ketchup company?
I might seriously think about it if I were an unknown ad agency or a filmmaker trying to break in to the commercial biz. Winning a contest like this would be a good way to get discovered,demonstrate your skills, and build a reputation.
It might not be cool, or artistically pure, or whatever criteria art snobs use to judge their work, but there's a metric asston of money to be made advertising everyday products. Ketchup isn't an exciting subject material, but everything you do can't be "art" (which is something pretentious film/art school students tend to forget).
In light of the recent Supreme Court patent ruling, Microsoft would be idiotic to take their patents anywhere near a courtroom. I suspect that most of the patents in question are in danger of being invalidated under the new rules for obviousness and prior art.
I've said for years that the feature that made the original Doom so popular wasn't the 3d graphics or deathmatch, but rather the fact that people could easily make their own levels.
The industry focused on the graphics (which were remarkable for the day), and the format (FPS) thinking that those were the keys to popularity, and neglected customizability.
Just because someone puts the entire HBO library on the internet doesn't mean that EVERYONE will download it. At a fair price, most people would rather pay for it and get a guaranteed "good" copy of the content. Apple's iTunes has proven this fact, since they are pulling in tons of money for 99c tracks (which the industry said was too low.) Exactly. "Free" content is only free you consider your time to be completely worthless.
Let's say it takes 10 minutes to search for a movie and kick off the download. Then the download runs overnight. Tomorrow, if I'm lucky, I can see if the file I downloaded is a) what I wanted and b) not completely fubared with compression artifacts. If I want it on a DVD I'm going to have to take more time to convert it back to standard format and burn it. Time == money. When your price point is low enough that it's 'cheaper' for most people to buy a legitimate copy than it is to download it, piracy will basically disappear.
I think the point the GP poster was making is that the Bush administration's attempts to manipulate public opinion are particularly blatant and transparent, even by DC standards.
The ability to say whatever you want is one of those lost freedoms once you sign on the dotted line
That's fine and dandy in today's all-volunteer military (well, actually it isn't fine and dandy, but that's a separate issue).
You need to remember that we once had a draft, and may very well have one again in the very near future. Being forcibly denied your rights and your freedom is an entirely different story than giving them up voluntarily.
Um, no. For a soldier, regulations like this are legal orders. Obey, or go to jail -- military jail, which is essentially extended Basic Training behind bars. Oh, and no parole or time off for good behavior.
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Don't fall in to the trap of assuming that because J&J is a for-profit corporation it is automatically evil, and that because ARC is non-profit they are automatically as pure as the driven snow. As corporations go, J&J is far from the worst. And while the ARC does do a lot of good things, they have a lot of problems, too. While they like to tout that they "only" have 9% overhead, that conveniently ignores a lot of highly questionable "relief" expenditures (EG massive overpayments to preferred vendors). And when it comes to generating revenue and defending their turf, ARC is just as vicious and underhanded as any big for-profit corporation.
There is no such thing as "tamper proof". The best you can ever hope for is "tamper evident" and "tamper resistant". Nothing in the world can protect you against a corrupt system administrator. Even a "two man rule" won't help you if they're working together to beat the system. If you're serious about information security, read The Orange Book .
The only way I can see to collect valid net-wide statistics would be to collect them from a random sampling of routers at various ISPs. Just looking at the backbone routers would miss all the traffic handled by private peering relationships.
The most you can possibly do is to make it hard enough that it takes an engineer with a bench full of test equipment to crack it, instead of a bright 14 year old with a PC and a debugger. That excludes 99.99% of the population, but it still leaves tens of thousands of people who have the tools and the skills needed -- and it only takes one of them to subvert the system, as DVD Jon has demonstrated.
So you've got a virtual machine. Big deal. Someone will reverse-engineer your VM so that it works the way THEY want it to instead of the way YOU want it to.
Furthermore, any C++ code can be algorithmically decomposed into C. Recall that Stroustrup initially implemented C++ as a preprocessor (written in C) which fed it's output to a C compiler. (same caveat applies)
I've maintained a lot of "C++" code where the only thing that distinguished it from straight C was the use of cout and
. IMHO, because of these facts C++ should more properly be considered an extension of C and not a distinct language in it's own right. I'm sure many people will disagree with me, probably even Bjarne himself. I admit that it's a pretty fine distinction, however, and arguing about it is almost as pointless as debating whether vi is better than emacs. (it is)
If you object to the C/C++ notation (which is pretty widely used throughout the industry, it's not something I just pulled out of my ass one day), you can mentally transform it into if you prefer.
1,2,3: Most of the other real estate in this solar system sucks. Mars might be terraformable at some date in the far future, and self-sustaining sealed ecosystems on the moon or large asteroids might also become possible at some point. Still not prime real estate by any stretch of the imagination. Possible to do: conceptually, yes, but not with current technology. Feasible is fuzzy... it depends on what the alternatives are. Same thing goes for extra-solar settlement.
4: Better alternative? No, especially not in our lifetimes. But it is still eventually necessary for the long-term survival of the human species. An extinction-level meteor impact WILL eventually happen (and has happened twice before), and even if we manage to avoid that the sun will eventually either go nova or burn out into a brown dwarf. But the fact that it's not an immediate necessity doesn't mean that we shouldn't start trying now. The time to move out of Pompey is BEFORE Vesuvius erupts... once you see the smoke, it's already too late.
5, 6, 7: You're reading your own biases into the GP post. I don't think anyone here is saying any of those things. We need to make this planet last as long as we can, so that we have time to advance far enough that we can seed other ones.
It's pointless to think about moving all of the human race to another planet; and even if it were possible, human nature is such that most people wouldn't leave even in the face of an impending catastrophe. At most we can do is provide the opportunity for a tiny percentage to migrate elsewhere and start breeding.
I could go on, but Heinlein does a better job of making this argument in several of his novels (Time Enough For Love in particular).
Very interesting post. Can you suggest any resources (online or print) that would serve as a starting point for a greenhouse n00b?
By actively filtering content, I would think that AT&T would be giving up it's legal protection as a common carrier and the safe harbor protection that status gives them under DMCA and other copyright laws. It may make the copyright cartels happy, but I think it'll be opening up a whole lot of other liability issues.
This needs to be repeated loudly and often. C/C++ is a great language, but there are only a very few instances where you really need to use it. C/C++ is optimized for making efficient use of hardware resources, CPU and memory in particular. On modern hardware, this is seldom the limiting factor -- you are far more likely to be constrained by I/O (network bandwidth / latency, database queries, etc). If you really need that kind of low-level control or cpu optimization, it's usually isolated to few critical functions -- the majority of the work that wraps those functions is better handled by a higher-level language. Writing an entire application end-to-end in C/C++ is usually a mistake
More importantly, most projects are constrained by PROGRAMMER TIME. A language that optimizes programmer efficiency rather than hardware efficiency provides a bigger benefit for the vast majority of development projects. Why write 100 lines of C or Java code when you can accomplish the same task with 10 or fewer lines of Perl, Python, or Ruby? Programmer productivity really soars when you have an easy-to-use repository of pre-written code modules like CPAN.
The same way they discovered filesharing in the first place -- word of mouth.
People with the technical knowledge will create the tools to get around the blocks. Everyone else will learn about them by word of mouth, download them, and use them. It makes no difference to them that they have no clue about how the technology actually works.
The whole Napster/p2p saga is the perfect rebuttal to your argument. The giant media conglomerates killed off Napster. Did that stop people from sharing music? Nope, you just got a huge proliferation of new and better p2p file sharing tools that are more resistant to the MAFIAA's shutdown tactics.
If AT&T and the other big carriers control the major pipes, new ones will spring up that aren't under their control. Wireless technology is improving and becoming more affordable on a daily basis, ad-hoc municipal networks are already a reality. If the commercial internet went away tomorrow, how long do you think it would take geeks to set up a Fidonet style network based on modern wireless technology? Days? Hours? It wouldn't take long, and it wouldn't take much longer than that for the non-geek population to join in.
And the states that are censoring will have the truth used upon them in the suppository fashion.
Exactly. Google, Yahoo! and MSN are not the entire internet. There are other search engines, other portals, other content providers. Even if all the major players kowtow to repressive governments in order to do business in those countries, there will still be billions of groups and individuals who aren't motivated by greed and/or fear.
Keyword filtering can be defeated by SSL or by using alternate encodings (EG base64/rot13/etc content that gets transparently decoded via javascript on the client browser). DNS and IP level blocking can be defeated with proxies, remailers, IM bots, etc. People will always find a way around content blocks faster than those blocks can adapt.
Do you have proof of concept code? If not, pardon me if I'm a bit skeptical. You might be able to do this, but I have doubts that you could do so without visibly distorting / corrupting the image.
I might seriously think about it if I were an unknown ad agency or a filmmaker trying to break in to the commercial biz. Winning a contest like this would be a good way to get discovered,demonstrate your skills, and build a reputation.
It might not be cool, or artistically pure, or whatever criteria art snobs use to judge their work, but there's a metric asston of money to be made advertising everyday products. Ketchup isn't an exciting subject material, but everything you do can't be "art" (which is something pretentious film/art school students tend to forget).
In light of the recent Supreme Court patent ruling, Microsoft would be idiotic to take their patents anywhere near a courtroom. I suspect that most of the patents in question are in danger of being invalidated under the new rules for obviousness and prior art.
I've said for years that the feature that made the original Doom so popular wasn't the 3d graphics or deathmatch, but rather the fact that people could easily make their own levels.
The industry focused on the graphics (which were remarkable for the day), and the format (FPS) thinking that those were the keys to popularity, and neglected customizability.
Exactly. "Free" content is only free you consider your time to be completely worthless. Let's say it takes 10 minutes to search for a movie and kick off the download. Then the download runs overnight. Tomorrow, if I'm lucky, I can see if the file I downloaded is a) what I wanted and b) not completely fubared with compression artifacts. If I want it on a DVD I'm going to have to take more time to convert it back to standard format and burn it. Time == money. When your price point is low enough that it's 'cheaper' for most people to buy a legitimate copy than it is to download it, piracy will basically disappear.
It was in "quotation marks" because it is a "quote"... as in something someone else said and I was "quoting". "Quotation", look it up some time.
I think the point the GP poster was making is that the Bush administration's attempts to manipulate public opinion are particularly blatant and transparent, even by DC standards.