Well, I hope you don't discover someone you care about is a Nazi! How would you ever have a deep, caring, and meaningful philosophical discussion on Slashdot about Nazis? It's impossible -- people have learned to just SHUT THE FUCK UP when the conversation turns to Nazis. We just don't talk about Nazis any more. And its really, really sad -- Nazis are people with feelings too! Just like pedophiles!
Shut up, guys. Blue, stop arguing with the AC Troll. Troll, go boil your head in acid. We all know the fat gay pedophile "friends" you keep talking about are really just you. And any of you other Humbert Humberts out there reading this -- go douse yourself with gas, and set yourself on fire.
You've proven my point perfectly. Censorship is a very dangerous game, and people who play with it are often confused when it bites them. If, as you say, the NAMBLA site described how to have sex with children without legal reprecussions, then it is describing what the laws are, and which of the actions these pervs enjoy that are not criminal. If you want to prevent people from discussing what is legal, and what is not legal, then you are asking for a very, very ugly world. You're asking for a world that most of us would not appreciate. Before we go around allowing other peole to decide what is right, and what is wrong, we should think long about who exactly is going to do the deciding.
Also, I should mention that the NAMBLA website is gone. It's been gone for as long as I can remember -- the only evidence I've ever seen of it is from people complaining of its existance. But if you went there long ago, and read it that close, and remember it that well, I honestly have to question your motives for doing so. I sure as hell wouldn't let you near any of my kids. I'm not kidding about that, either.
I would in half a heartbeat be happy to not allow porn sites on my system unless they ended in.porn/.xxx.
This is the real problem I have with.xxx. It would quickly become a quasi-legal standard, like the atrocious movie ratings system here in the United States, or those "voluntary" Parental Advisory labels that Tipper Gore made so incredibly important in in the sale and distribution of records here.
Unfortunately, I don't think most people who would like to filter porn have ever spent any time trying to figure out what pornography really is. I certainly have no idea what is "pornographic." Just about everyone would agree that a site like www.whitehouse.com definitely falls under the common definition of pornography. But what about the disgusting site rotten.com? Certainly, it contains a great deal of disgusting stuff that certainly isn't pornography, and some stuff that might be. Where it go?
Or, for a more difficult distinction, what about a site like photo.net? Certainly, there are plenty of photos of naked people there (or, at least, there were the last time I looked, about 5 years ago). Is it pornography? What about a document describing all sorts of disgusting perversions, like The Starr Report? Is that porn? Do we have to protect kids from that?
On an even more omininous tone, how about a totally serious political activism site, that just happens to be a political activism site for disgusting sexual perverts, like The North American Man-Boy Love Association? Where on earth do we put constitutionally protected political speech when that speech is considered the worse form of pornography available by many people?
Filtering already opens a big enough can of worms, even when the criteria for the filtering is (nominally) in the hands of the reciever of the information -- each person browsing theoretically has some chance to decide for themselves what criteria to use for "bad" sites. But to pre-apply the "pornography" criteria to a huge number of sites, and to apply it based on the discretion of people who are neither the content providers or the content consumers, is asking for a system rife with abuses and problems.
And if you believe your narrow definition of pornography is going to be the definition used by all sides when it comes time to start segregating the sites, you should spend some time really listening to what people are saying. No-one is going to be happy with the definition of porn, escpecially in a world where movies like Eyes Wide Cut can be defined as "Adult Only Pornography" by the American standards.
You are sitting in the middle of a virtual warehouse that is a database. You see virtual cabinets and files. All you need to do is take a look up and you automatically come to some draw that contains the data you need.
Of course! Why didn't I realize this before. The "Take a Look UP!" interface.
Hmm... I need to find the code that used to draw that widget. Well, "Take a Look UP!" Ah! There it is!.
I need the Letter I sent to Verisign two weeks ago, and they're pretending not to have again. Well, "Take a Look UP!" There it is!
I'm searching for data about the US income tax rate in 1980. Well, put on the 3D goggles, and "Take a Look UP!" Duh! Why couldn't I find that before?
I'd like to find the actual glyphs used to write the name "Achilles" in the oldest copies of the Illiad that still exist. "Take a Look UP!" Man, this could make research easy!
But wait -- I'm just being a jerk. Certainly, those huge physical card catalogs that filled rooms in most libraries were far, far more intuitive and featureful than any of the online indices we have today. Why, in those, to find a book by Mark Twain, you just hunted around for a while, until you found the room with the R-Z catalog. Then, you just found the bank with the Taz-Smith (cont.). Then, you just found the row with Tu-Sac. Then, you found the drawer with Twa-Tzam. Then, you looked through that draw until you found Twain! Oh, shit. It says: see Clemens, Samuel. Thats so intuitive! I hope to do that in VR sometime soon!
Heck -- I don't even 2.5 dimension overlapping windows. In fact, I think 2.5 dimension overlapping window desktop metaphor is the most asinine thing I've ever seen. It works for transients, like menus and modal dialog boxes (don't get me started on modal dialog boxes), but why the hell would I want to see only half of my vi window, behind netscape? I'm waiting for the day the desktop metaphor dies. And you want to bring back card catalogs? Whatever.
I am, however, not a luddite. There are places where "3d" presentation of information is interesting, and even useful. The "warehouse" metaphor for data is useless, though. Have you ever actually been in a warehouse? Getting things into and out of a warehouse is hard. Useful organization for items is made extremely dificult by the fact that real objects are painfully restricted to existing in only one place at a time, and that place takes up non-zero space and mass. The cool think about virtual objects is that they don't take up space, and can be an infinite number of places at once. You want to confine virtual data by the constraints of the medium we once used to store that data? Bleah.
Another problem with Emacs is that noone is there to guarentee it's security.
Has anyone ever actually tried to audit Emacs for security?
Has anyone made any real effort to assure there aren't any dumb bugs in, say, the emacs built-in news reader that might allow a malicious news message to run arbitrary emacs code? Are we sure there aren't any bugs in Emac's C source parser, formatter, and x-ref facility that might allow arbitrary emacs code to be run? Has someone checked the vi emulation package with a fine tooth comb? What about the built in mail reader? What about the built-in Zippy the PinHead quote generator? What about the Eliza package? What about the Emacs web browser? Do I have any assurance that a malicious web page can't run arbitrary emacs code? What about the Emacs Slashdot reader? Is that secure?
I guess what I'm saying is that Emacs is a huge beast of a program. It contains its own nifty little byte code virtual machine with a lot of nifty hooks into your environment, and its own nifty lisp compiler that targets that virtual machine, and its designed to be easily extendable by its users, loading and running new code into that virtual machine at the drop of a hat. Its a great program if you like to reprogram your editor while you edit. Heck, you can even easily let your documents reprogram your editor, if you use the file-local-variable stuff. But has anyone examined Emacs closely to determine if any of the things Emacs does are all done securely?
Unfortunately, they are going for $30K a peice and are only making a few (10!) per year.
I would be very, very suprised if these were as cheap as $30K each. I expect these things are expensive. They're shipping them to Lawrence Livermore, for christ's sake -- not some little $20 million dollar dot com where a VC might blanche at the bill.
Of course, since they're being used with ASIC White, I'd have to imagine that however many millions of dollars these 10 displays are going for, they make up only a small part of the total rental and service contract bill for any given month. Heck, IBM may have even just tossed 'em in as a promotional item, like the toy in a crackerjack box. "FREE! With every $100,000,000.00 purchase, a 22" super display! Offer available only for US government (and Batman)."
I imagine some of you are drooling over this display for the reason my friends always give for their insanely-high resolution: "Just think of how many more windows I can have open at once!"
I'm afraid I'm thinking of this in almost exactly the opposite way you are. My vision is reasonably good -- slightly better than 20/20 without glasses, even better with glasses. But text is difficult to read from a standard computer display for me, too. Guess what -- it's difficult for anyone to read. Why? In part, because standard displays have awful, awful, awful resolution. And with the standard, antiquated software that comes on nearly every computer made, the size of the text on the display is dependent on the resolution. The better I make the resolution, the smaller the text gets -- it unbelievable to me that I'm still using software shitty enough to demand that. But hey, what can you do? Its not like its a new millenium yet (wait another month and a half for that).
I guarantee that as high resolution displays become available, the idea that the size of the text on the monitor is somehow tied to the resolution of the monitor will go away. Think, for example, of printers -- imagine if someone said to you today, "I only buy the lowest resolution printers I can find. In fact, I prefer the old 120 dpi bubble jets. That way, the text looks bigger when I print, and its easier to read." You'd look at them as if they had a huge screw loose inside their head. "Why," you'd think, "would anyone on earth believe the resolution of the printer would affect the size of the text? The text is always scaled to be the same size -- the lower the resolution, the blockier the letters get. Lower resolution makes it harder to read -- not easier."
With any luck at all, in 10 years resolution independent display drivers will exist, and the idea that higher resolution is somehow "harder" to read will go away. Unless, of course, you're still using X windows. Bleh.
I probably ask my boss once a week if we can use "real" CSS in the pages we build. Far too often, he says "no, the customer says we have to support Netscape." So, we're limited to the pathetic subset of CSS1 that Netscape supports, and we make up for the deficits through the disgusting use of a writhing mass of <table> and <font> tags.
But guess what! Someday soon, our customers are going to stop demanding Netscape v4 support. Unfortunately, if Internet Explorer is the only viable browser at that point, we will build pages with whatever implemenation defined "standard" the guys in Redmond have given us. But if there is another browser in use (perhaps Netscape v6, perhaps something else), we will have a much greater incentive to write pages that are close to the w3c proposed standards, and then work within the bugs and implemenation details of the available browsers.
So, you're correct -- no one is using css. Someday soon, support for Netscape v4 will be dropped. If there is another browser available, CSS will be used. If there is not another browser available, whatever IE has will be the defacto standard.
Oops. It was a joke that everyone in the United States got, but it probably didn't make much sense to the rest of the world. Basically, over here we're running a presidential election, and one of the dumber canidates had a very, very hard time saying the word "subliminal" -- for various reasons, he said it many, many times in one day, and each time it came out "subliminable."
Unfortunately, every single person in the United States ended up hearing this chucklehead say "subliminable" a few hundred times. Thank god for the American media -- always covering the really important issues that matter, like pronunciation. Believe me -- you're lucky your from some part of the world where your not going to vote in the US elections tomorrow. If you were, you'd be pulling your hair out like the rest of us.
What is this guy complaining about? Netscape has decided to put a feature freeze on Netscape v6.0, and is being very selective about what makes it into the codebase. Finally, Netscape wants to realease a browser, instead of releasing press releases.
Unfortunately, this is going to mean that some documented "misbehaviours" will not be fixed for Netscape 6. They'll be fixed in Mozilla, and fixed in later releases of Netscape, but they won't be fixed in this one. Oh well - sometimes, that happens. If it this matters to you, use Mozilla instead of Netscape. Or, use Internet Explorer.
But Netscape has to realease something. That fetid pile of refuse they've been limping along on for the last few years is simply horrible -- it doesn't even pretend to support any of standards proposed by w3 in the last four years. The CSS1 support is a cruel, hideous joke. The CSS positional content crap makes my hair turn grey. The DOM is entirely non-standard, and provides almost no scriptable elements -- essentially, Netscape v4 allows you to swap images, hide and show layers, and manipulate form elements. Thats it. Its hardly more than Netscape 2 provided. Some incredible effects have been created using these paltry tools, but I shudder to think how much hair someone lost trying to create them. Internet Explorer is much, much easier to develop for -- it supports the w3 proposed standards much, much better than Netscape v4 ever did. In some cases, it supports them as well as Netscape v6 plans to.
Unfortunately, there is only one widely used standards compliant browser -- Internet Explorer. More and more websites will abandon Netscape in the coming years. I am certain of this. If a credible standards compliant competitor to IE emerges, then I believe most developers will develop to those specifications. Unfortanately, if no competitor implementing CSS or the DOM emerges, then developers will continue developing to IE's implementation of those specifications, along with all the other non-stadard extensions IE introduces.
Frankly, the abandonment of Netscape is happening today, and the problem is going to accelerate. Unless some browser gets a toe hold in now, soon the web will be full of IE specific pages -- pages which follow no published standard, but instead are written to whatever implementation those guys at Redmond decides to give us. We need a second standards compliant browser available for most platforms, so that people have a reason to use the standards. A standard is only useful in the face of competition.
But what if they aren't targetting the major game makers? There are plenty of small shops that have wanted to produce games for the abovementioned systems, but can't, because they can't afford the fees.
How many millions of dollars do they sell these developer kits for? I find it incredible that the developer kit is the bottleneck to making good games, instead of the expense of the visual artists and 3d artists and sound artists and designers and programmers and project managers and business managers and distribution experts.
But if you say that the real expense is the developer kit, I'm inclined to believe you. Just tell us how many millions of dollars that devoper kit is, would you?
Where I live (Philadelphia) there seem to be plenty of theaters that play unrated movies.
Don't move to Fargo, North Dakota. We have one independent screen and about 30 chain screens here (screens, not theatres). The four chain theatres would never, ever play an unrated movie. The independent theatre does, but with only one screen they can't bring us a very large selection of movies.
As far as video goes, Blockbuster has the largest selection of movies around here. And I don't just mean they have the largest number of available tapes -- I mean they have the largest selection of movies. Seriously. Perhaps that doesn't suprise you, but I've certainly never been anywhere on earth before where Blocbuster's selection would be considered comparatively good.
Of course, if your target market for a movie or game is bumblefuckville, you have much bigger problems than just distribution.
I agree -- why would this guy go to all the trouble of making a statement about the banality of high school's social order, and then turn around and beg to be re-admitted to that order?
If he really thought he was protesting something, he should be prepared to make the sacrifices protesting demands. In almost every case, the sacrifices as a result of the protest are much more important at swaying the popular opinion than the protest ever could be.
But I suspect the effort to expunge the record is just another part of the protest. Hopefully, he has no real desire to expunge the record, any more than he ever had any real desire to be homecoming king. Demanding that his record be expunged is just a way of milking more publicity out of the original protest act.
I realize the comparison wasn't fair, and I didn't intend that it should be taken very seriously. In fact, I find comparing operating systems on a "fragmentation" metric to be silly under even the best of circumstances. For many reason, Unix has always been a very fragmented set of operating systems. That fact has simultaneously been one of Unix's greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses.
My honest opionion is that Linux has gained an advantage over BSD by the very nature of its fragmentation (in distributions -- not in the kernel). Some of that advantage has been technical, but much of it has been social; the wide variety of linux has allowed just about everyone to find something in linux they like. Whether you're a l337 hacker trying to learn all the "arcane" options to "1337" commands like 'tar -xf && configure && make install', or an IBM executive trying to find a distribution to offer on workstations, or a software vendor hoping to escape the Microsoft hedgonomy, there is a Linux distribution made just for you.
It can also be argued that widespread linux buy-in has lead to a much wider variety of hardware and softare available to linux, making linux more flexible than BSD, and in some sense, technically superiour to BSD. This is dangerous arguement, however, as the same arguement leads us to believe that DOS is somehow superiour to both. In fact, the exact opposite may be true -- it is possible that an unfortunate side effect of a rush to popularity is a desire to provide a laundry list of desirable sounding items, instead of a short list of necessary items done correctly. Unfortunately, it also often true that broken things are talked about much more often than working things -- there is a strange correlation between popularity and brokeness that simply can't be ignored.
Unlike most people here, I do not believe "choice is good." At least, I do not believe it in the sense that it is often said -- I see no great advantage to being able to choose KDE or Gnome, or among a half dozen Java Virtual Machines, or among a dozen or so competing Linux distributions. But choice is very important in some cases. Different computers are used for different things. The demands placed on a farm of inexpensive webservers or a mail server are very, very different than the demands placed on a personal workstation, which are very different than the demands on a 365x24x7 SPF database server. Choice here is good. The option to choose the right tool for the task is very important. It does not matter much to me if I choose among two tools available for a job, which both do pretty much the same thing. It does matter to me if I can choose one good tool for one job, and another good tool for another job. This is where the choice between linux and BSD is good.
But there is another way to interpret choice; it can be interpreted as freedom. Its the kind of freedom that RMS keeps talking about -- the freedom to improve something that needs improving. BSD and linux are not so much about giving consumers a choice of operating systems (which is good, because they're not really interchangable), but instead about giving the developers a choice to develop what they feel needs developing. If I want BSD with SMP support, its entirely my choice to make a BSD with better SMP support. If I want a journaling filesystem, its entirely my choice to make a journaling file system. Its my choice.
This kind of choice really is what has led to both the fragmentation and vitality of Unix through the years. I would have to imagine that most of us on slashdot have had more accounts on more unix varients than we can count on our fingers and toes. We've all pulled our hair out over the differences. And we've all also realized that without every vendor being free to build their own thing, and copy each other, Unix would have stagnated and died long, long ago.
Yep. Only four BSD. Not fragmented at all. Jus four BSD: OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, BSD/OS... and Darwin.
Err, I mean five. Only five BSD. Still, BSD is not fragmented at all. Just five BSD: OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, BSD/OS, Darwin... and MacOS X.
OK. Only six BSD. Still, its not that fragmented. Only six BSD: OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, BSD/OS, Darwin, MacOSX... and 4.4 BSD Lite Mach Server.
Hmm... maybe I'll try again. Only seven BSD. If you squint, they're not fragmented at all. Just seven wafer thin BSD versions. Unless you count all the old BSD operating systems, like SunOS, Ultrix, NeXT step, etc. Only seven. Until tomorrow.
Yeah -- BSD isn't fragmented, and like you said, it never will be.
Just like you don't go breaking into a TV station to see how it works, you shouldn't go sneaking into people's sites to see how they work. It's exactly the same!
I couldn't agree more. And if you get cable, you shouldn't be looking at the scrambled stations, just to see if you can catch a glimpse of a boob. You will go to hell if you do that -- that boob is the intellectual property of the broadcasting station, and they wouldn't just broadcast it out to everyone. No, its a tightly controlled encrypted intellectual property boob, not to be reverse engineered or decrypted in any way, shape, or form, without the prior written consent of the intellectual property owner.
If you wouldn't just go look at a boob on tv, what makes you think you can look at other stuff in other places? No-one is giving you the right to just look around at stuff. Didn't you learn not to be curious about boobs and computers and all that other bad stuff in kindergarten? I sure did. Thats why I'm not going to hell, and you are.
If I get a company car, is that earnings? If my company pays my health insurance, is that earnings? If I use half my house as a coffee shop, how much of my house payments count as a business expense? If my company gives me tuition re-imbursement, is that earnings? If I'm required to take continuing education classes to keep certifications required for my job, do I pay taxes on the money I spend? If I'm a pizza dilivery guy, and drive my own car, how much of my car expenses count as business expenses?
Do you think the question "how much do you earn" can always be answered by looking at a W-2 form? What do you imagine all those miles of tax codes are for, then?
I'll admit that the stuff like "stuff you get stolen from you can be knocked off your earnings" or "if you get sick and have to pay hospital bills, it gets knocked off your earnings" or "if you pay interest on your home, it gets knocked off your earnings" are mostly just fluff. But thats not where most of the complications seem to come from in the tax codes. Most of the complications come when you try to do anything non-traditional, and try to figure out your earnings at the end of the year.
Re:Haven't I seen all this before?
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Perl 6 Showcase
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why should Perl succeed where Lisp failed?
A gerbil could learn the Lisp syntax in about a half hour. I don't think I've ever met anyone who was aware of all the Perl syntax. (And I've met some smart people who use Perl a lot. If you think you understand Perl syntax, would you please annotate some of the more interesting perl poetry and abigail sigs, then explain it all to me?) So, naturally, Perl has a huge advantage over Lisp.
Let me explain. I get a warm fuzzy feeling every time I learn a new thing. Since I like to learn a lot of programming languages, its relatively easy for me to learn new syntax, and get that warm fuzzy feeling fairly often. For a language like Perl, I'm still getting that warm fuzzy feeling a few times a month, and its still suprisingly easy to get that glow.
Conversely, since Lisp pretty much has no syntax to speak of, I can only get that warm fuzzy glow by learning ideas much more complicated than syntax. I think I can safely say that anything is more complicated to learn than syntax -- anyone who knows more than a half dozen programming languages has almost undoubtedly taught him or herself how to learn new syntax very easily and quickly. The complicated stuff that Lisp makes possible to learn almost immediately is difficult and painful to learn. I personally can never learn more than one or two difficult ideas a week, and I the difficulty of learning it often overshadows that warm fuzzy glow I get from finally learning it.
In short, Perl is rewarding to learn, Lisp is not.
And before anyone mods me down as a troll or flamebait, understand that I am 100% serious about everything I've written here. I really do believe that most people learn new things for the intrinsic reward for learning it, and certain programming languages are popular precisely because they are so rewarding to learn. Similarly, many languages are unpopular because they aren't very rewarding to learn at all. But, what makes a language rewarding to learn often has suprisingly little to do with how elegant or powerful a language is.
No, the guy is not serious. At least, he's not serious in the way you think. In a previous post, he said he thought it was important to look through the Gnome source code to look for racism in the code itself (and not just in the comments, either... he wants to look for racist while loops). The guy clearly thinks he's joking.
Unfortunately, on some levels I suspect he's not joking. I wonder if he's not some guy with some subtle racial prejudices of his own. I think he's proping up straw men in front of some important issues. What he's done, I'm afraid, is to convince a small minority of people that he's actually defending the position he espouses, and those people can be led to mistakenly believe that those flimsly straw men are the real defenses for those positions.
Unfortunately, once you start to believe that there are only strawmen still carping about racism in the world, one quickly begins to shut out the real voices and real men who are talking about racism. In a subtle way, by arguing about racism, this tyrone fine character is really arguing against it.
In the end, the only defense against folks like Tyrone is to laugh at them, and failing that, to ignore them. But we can never, ever, believe that they really believe what they are saying. Arguing with them actual makes you weaker.
That's great. However, neither of those URL's are links to the study! Instead, they are links to and article about the study. I long ago gave up trying to piece together what any study might have been about by reading the garbage that some poorly informed reporter managed to bang out a few minutes before deadline on a friday afternoon.
Obviously, the internet has been a great boon to society. However, the truth is many internet "news" sites contain articles based on some half-cocked and poorly researched idea by some random author. Often, those articles are little more than trolls, posted to increase hits, or make the readers feel good about themselves (and increase hits). The odddest thing about this phenomenon is that it hasn't clued more people on the the fact that most "real" brick-and-mortar news sites have been doing exactly the same thing for hundreds of years.
If you read this AP article and thought you were getting information, you have been trolled by a brick and mortar news source. If you want real information, go read the actual study.
Just becuase you took one Intro to Psychology course 12 years ago, you're in no position to question Jon Katz and the collective wisdom of Slashdot. The minor trifling fact that the study is not on the Minneapolis Star Tribune website should not give you pause, or force you question the incredible depth of research that went into this story. Despite the fact that the only information we have on the study is the deranged ramblings of a probably confused AP reporter, you have no reason to question the validity of anything that Slashdot says, especially when what Slashdot says is so self-validating to so many of us in the geek community.
It is painfully clear to me that without the social interaction of the net, I would never realize the existance of Penis Birds, Hot Grits, or even Natelie Portman. I would also never spend my valuable time trolling on web logs, like I am doing right now. In short, the net has been an incredible boon to both myself, and many of the other members of slashdot, such as Anne Marie.
there's so much little hiss, noise, and brumm on analog stuff
The point is, no-one I know records on analog stuff anymore. I certainly don't, and my brother's garage band certainly doesn't. Heck, even my mom doesn't record on analog stuff anymore. The only analog thing left in my house may be my answering machine, and I'm not going to record anything important off that (unless I somehow get Carl Cassel to record my outgoing message).
Watermarking is going to have to work with home-brewed digital recording, or it will never be used by any of the early adopters, and it will never gain enough traction to get into normal users homes. Face it -- if you still record with analog, you're probably not going to run out and buy the latest watermark-enabled recording device, either. If you record digitally, you're not going to buy something that prevents you from using the stuff you legally create.
i mean, if it can be played, it can be recorded - and if the watermarking is done so that human can't hear it, then you can't hear it in the copy either.
Who cares if you can hear it? More to the point, why would you care if a computer could detect it? Until it becomes illegal to distribute programs that play audio without checking for watermarks, how is the presence of lack of a watermark going to affect me in any way?
Or will I have to retroactively add a watermark to my wedding video, before I can edit it on my computer? If my brother sends me a CD of his garage band, will I have to take it down to Media Play or Barnes and Noble to get watermarked before I can listen to it on my stereo? If e-mail a recording of my kid saying "mama" off to my relatives, are they going to have to visit www.riaa.com to get a license to listen to the e-mail?
If someone can distribute a player that doesn't care about the water marks in any of those sound files, why would that player care about the watermarks in the latest Britney Augilara CD?
I must be missing something fundemental about watermarking here. Unless I suddenly find myself in a world where the only audio I listen to are those sounds pre-approved by one of the major record labels, one hundred percent of the stuff I send around is going to be home-brewed audio. And any program or hardware that makes it more inconvenient to listen to that home-brewed audio isn't going to make it into my house, and it isn't going to make it into the house of anyone I know.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I hope you don't discover someone you care about is a Nazi! How would you ever have a deep, caring, and meaningful philosophical discussion on Slashdot about Nazis? It's impossible -- people have learned to just SHUT THE FUCK UP when the conversation turns to Nazis. We just don't talk about Nazis any more. And its really, really sad -- Nazis are people with feelings too! Just like pedophiles!
Shut up, guys. Blue, stop arguing with the AC Troll. Troll, go boil your head in acid. We all know the fat gay pedophile "friends" you keep talking about are really just you. And any of you other Humbert Humberts out there reading this -- go douse yourself with gas, and set yourself on fire.
This is NOT free speech, it is a CRIME.
You've proven my point perfectly. Censorship is a very dangerous game, and people who play with it are often confused when it bites them. If, as you say, the NAMBLA site described how to have sex with children without legal reprecussions, then it is describing what the laws are, and which of the actions these pervs enjoy that are not criminal. If you want to prevent people from discussing what is legal, and what is not legal, then you are asking for a very, very ugly world. You're asking for a world that most of us would not appreciate. Before we go around allowing other peole to decide what is right, and what is wrong, we should think long about who exactly is going to do the deciding.
Also, I should mention that the NAMBLA website is gone. It's been gone for as long as I can remember -- the only evidence I've ever seen of it is from people complaining of its existance. But if you went there long ago, and read it that close, and remember it that well, I honestly have to question your motives for doing so. I sure as hell wouldn't let you near any of my kids. I'm not kidding about that, either.
I would in half a heartbeat be happy to not allow porn sites on my system unless they ended in .porn/.xxx.
.xxx. It would quickly become a quasi-legal standard, like the atrocious movie ratings system here in the United States, or those "voluntary" Parental Advisory labels that Tipper Gore made so incredibly important in in the sale and distribution of records here.
This is the real problem I have with
Unfortunately, I don't think most people who would like to filter porn have ever spent any time trying to figure out what pornography really is. I certainly have no idea what is "pornographic." Just about everyone would agree that a site like www.whitehouse.com definitely falls under the common definition of pornography. But what about the disgusting site rotten.com? Certainly, it contains a great deal of disgusting stuff that certainly isn't pornography, and some stuff that might be. Where it go?
Or, for a more difficult distinction, what about a site like photo.net? Certainly, there are plenty of photos of naked people there (or, at least, there were the last time I looked, about 5 years ago). Is it pornography? What about a document describing all sorts of disgusting perversions, like The Starr Report? Is that porn? Do we have to protect kids from that?
On an even more omininous tone, how about a totally serious political activism site, that just happens to be a political activism site for disgusting sexual perverts, like The North American Man-Boy Love Association? Where on earth do we put constitutionally protected political speech when that speech is considered the worse form of pornography available by many people?
Filtering already opens a big enough can of worms, even when the criteria for the filtering is (nominally) in the hands of the reciever of the information -- each person browsing theoretically has some chance to decide for themselves what criteria to use for "bad" sites. But to pre-apply the "pornography" criteria to a huge number of sites, and to apply it based on the discretion of people who are neither the content providers or the content consumers, is asking for a system rife with abuses and problems.
And if you believe your narrow definition of pornography is going to be the definition used by all sides when it comes time to start segregating the sites, you should spend some time really listening to what people are saying. No-one is going to be happy with the definition of porn, escpecially in a world where movies like Eyes Wide Cut can be defined as "Adult Only Pornography" by the American standards.
You are sitting in the middle of a virtual warehouse that is a database. You see virtual cabinets and files. All you need to do is take a look up and you automatically come to some draw that contains the data you need.
Of course! Why didn't I realize this before. The "Take a Look UP!" interface.
Hmm... I need to find the code that used to draw that widget. Well, "Take a Look UP!" Ah! There it is!.
I need the Letter I sent to Verisign two weeks ago, and they're pretending not to have again. Well, "Take a Look UP!" There it is!
I'm searching for data about the US income tax rate in 1980. Well, put on the 3D goggles, and "Take a Look UP!" Duh! Why couldn't I find that before?
I'd like to find the actual glyphs used to write the name "Achilles" in the oldest copies of the Illiad that still exist. "Take a Look UP!" Man, this could make research easy!
But wait -- I'm just being a jerk. Certainly, those huge physical card catalogs that filled rooms in most libraries were far, far more intuitive and featureful than any of the online indices we have today. Why, in those, to find a book by Mark Twain, you just hunted around for a while, until you found the room with the R-Z catalog. Then, you just found the bank with the Taz-Smith (cont.). Then, you just found the row with Tu-Sac. Then, you found the drawer with Twa-Tzam. Then, you looked through that draw until you found Twain! Oh, shit. It says: see Clemens, Samuel. Thats so intuitive! I hope to do that in VR sometime soon!
Heck -- I don't even 2.5 dimension overlapping windows. In fact, I think 2.5 dimension overlapping window desktop metaphor is the most asinine thing I've ever seen. It works for transients, like menus and modal dialog boxes (don't get me started on modal dialog boxes), but why the hell would I want to see only half of my vi window, behind netscape? I'm waiting for the day the desktop metaphor dies. And you want to bring back card catalogs? Whatever.
I am, however, not a luddite. There are places where "3d" presentation of information is interesting, and even useful. The "warehouse" metaphor for data is useless, though. Have you ever actually been in a warehouse? Getting things into and out of a warehouse is hard. Useful organization for items is made extremely dificult by the fact that real objects are painfully restricted to existing in only one place at a time, and that place takes up non-zero space and mass. The cool think about virtual objects is that they don't take up space, and can be an infinite number of places at once. You want to confine virtual data by the constraints of the medium we once used to store that data? Bleah.
Another problem with Emacs is that noone is there to guarentee it's security.
Has anyone ever actually tried to audit Emacs for security?
Has anyone made any real effort to assure there aren't any dumb bugs in, say, the emacs built-in news reader that might allow a malicious news message to run arbitrary emacs code? Are we sure there aren't any bugs in Emac's C source parser, formatter, and x-ref facility that might allow arbitrary emacs code to be run? Has someone checked the vi emulation package with a fine tooth comb? What about the built in mail reader? What about the built-in Zippy the PinHead quote generator? What about the Eliza package? What about the Emacs web browser? Do I have any assurance that a malicious web page can't run arbitrary emacs code? What about the Emacs Slashdot reader? Is that secure?
I guess what I'm saying is that Emacs is a huge beast of a program. It contains its own nifty little byte code virtual machine with a lot of nifty hooks into your environment, and its own nifty lisp compiler that targets that virtual machine, and its designed to be easily extendable by its users, loading and running new code into that virtual machine at the drop of a hat. Its a great program if you like to reprogram your editor while you edit. Heck, you can even easily let your documents reprogram your editor, if you use the file-local-variable stuff. But has anyone examined Emacs closely to determine if any of the things Emacs does are all done securely?
Unfortunately, they are going for $30K a peice and are only making a few (10!) per year.
I would be very, very suprised if these were as cheap as $30K each. I expect these things are expensive. They're shipping them to Lawrence Livermore, for christ's sake -- not some little $20 million dollar dot com where a VC might blanche at the bill.
Of course, since they're being used with ASIC White, I'd have to imagine that however many millions of dollars these 10 displays are going for, they make up only a small part of the total rental and service contract bill for any given month. Heck, IBM may have even just tossed 'em in as a promotional item, like the toy in a crackerjack box. "FREE! With every $100,000,000.00 purchase, a 22" super display! Offer available only for US government (and Batman)."
I imagine some of you are drooling over this display for the reason my friends always give for their insanely-high resolution: "Just think of how many more windows I can have open at once!"
I'm afraid I'm thinking of this in almost exactly the opposite way you are. My vision is reasonably good -- slightly better than 20/20 without glasses, even better with glasses. But text is difficult to read from a standard computer display for me, too. Guess what -- it's difficult for anyone to read. Why? In part, because standard displays have awful, awful, awful resolution. And with the standard, antiquated software that comes on nearly every computer made, the size of the text on the display is dependent on the resolution. The better I make the resolution, the smaller the text gets -- it unbelievable to me that I'm still using software shitty enough to demand that. But hey, what can you do? Its not like its a new millenium yet (wait another month and a half for that).
I guarantee that as high resolution displays become available, the idea that the size of the text on the monitor is somehow tied to the resolution of the monitor will go away. Think, for example, of printers -- imagine if someone said to you today, "I only buy the lowest resolution printers I can find. In fact, I prefer the old 120 dpi bubble jets. That way, the text looks bigger when I print, and its easier to read." You'd look at them as if they had a huge screw loose inside their head. "Why," you'd think, "would anyone on earth believe the resolution of the printer would affect the size of the text? The text is always scaled to be the same size -- the lower the resolution, the blockier the letters get. Lower resolution makes it harder to read -- not easier."
With any luck at all, in 10 years resolution independent display drivers will exist, and the idea that higher resolution is somehow "harder" to read will go away. Unless, of course, you're still using X windows. Bleh.
NO ONE IS USING CSS.
I probably ask my boss once a week if we can use "real" CSS in the pages we build. Far too often, he says "no, the customer says we have to support Netscape." So, we're limited to the pathetic subset of CSS1 that Netscape supports, and we make up for the deficits through the disgusting use of a writhing mass of <table> and <font> tags.
But guess what! Someday soon, our customers are going to stop demanding Netscape v4 support. Unfortunately, if Internet Explorer is the only viable browser at that point, we will build pages with whatever implemenation defined "standard" the guys in Redmond have given us. But if there is another browser in use (perhaps Netscape v6, perhaps something else), we will have a much greater incentive to write pages that are close to the w3c proposed standards, and then work within the bugs and implemenation details of the available browsers.
So, you're correct -- no one is using css. Someday soon, support for Netscape v4 will be dropped. If there is another browser available, CSS will be used. If there is not another browser available, whatever IE has will be the defacto standard.
No. No, he doesn't.
Oops. It was a joke that everyone in the United States got, but it probably didn't make much sense to the rest of the world. Basically, over here we're running a presidential election, and one of the dumber canidates had a very, very hard time saying the word "subliminal" -- for various reasons, he said it many, many times in one day, and each time it came out "subliminable."
Unfortunately, every single person in the United States ended up hearing this chucklehead say "subliminable" a few hundred times. Thank god for the American media -- always covering the really important issues that matter, like pronunciation. Believe me -- you're lucky your from some part of the world where your not going to vote in the US elections tomorrow. If you were, you'd be pulling your hair out like the rest of us.
What is this guy complaining about? Netscape has decided to put a feature freeze on Netscape v6.0, and is being very selective about what makes it into the codebase. Finally, Netscape wants to realease a browser, instead of releasing press releases.
Unfortunately, this is going to mean that some documented "misbehaviours" will not be fixed for Netscape 6. They'll be fixed in Mozilla, and fixed in later releases of Netscape, but they won't be fixed in this one. Oh well - sometimes, that happens. If it this matters to you, use Mozilla instead of Netscape. Or, use Internet Explorer.
But Netscape has to realease something. That fetid pile of refuse they've been limping along on for the last few years is simply horrible -- it doesn't even pretend to support any of standards proposed by w3 in the last four years. The CSS1 support is a cruel, hideous joke. The CSS positional content crap makes my hair turn grey. The DOM is entirely non-standard, and provides almost no scriptable elements -- essentially, Netscape v4 allows you to swap images, hide and show layers, and manipulate form elements. Thats it. Its hardly more than Netscape 2 provided. Some incredible effects have been created using these paltry tools, but I shudder to think how much hair someone lost trying to create them. Internet Explorer is much, much easier to develop for -- it supports the w3 proposed standards much, much better than Netscape v4 ever did. In some cases, it supports them as well as Netscape v6 plans to.
Unfortunately, there is only one widely used standards compliant browser -- Internet Explorer. More and more websites will abandon Netscape in the coming years. I am certain of this. If a credible standards compliant competitor to IE emerges, then I believe most developers will develop to those specifications. Unfortanately, if no competitor implementing CSS or the DOM emerges, then developers will continue developing to IE's implementation of those specifications, along with all the other non-stadard extensions IE introduces.
Frankly, the abandonment of Netscape is happening today, and the problem is going to accelerate. Unless some browser gets a toe hold in now, soon the web will be full of IE specific pages -- pages which follow no published standard, but instead are written to whatever implementation those guys at Redmond decides to give us. We need a second standards compliant browser available for most platforms, so that people have a reason to use the standards. A standard is only useful in the face of competition.
But what if they aren't targetting the major game makers? There are plenty of small shops that have wanted to produce games for the abovementioned systems, but can't, because they can't afford the fees.
How many millions of dollars do they sell these developer kits for? I find it incredible that the developer kit is the bottleneck to making good games, instead of the expense of the visual artists and 3d artists and sound artists and designers and programmers and project managers and business managers and distribution experts.
But if you say that the real expense is the developer kit, I'm inclined to believe you. Just tell us how many millions of dollars that devoper kit is, would you?
Where I live (Philadelphia) there seem to be plenty of theaters that play unrated movies.
Don't move to Fargo, North Dakota. We have one independent screen and about 30 chain screens here (screens, not theatres). The four chain theatres would never, ever play an unrated movie. The independent theatre does, but with only one screen they can't bring us a very large selection of movies.
As far as video goes, Blockbuster has the largest selection of movies around here. And I don't just mean they have the largest number of available tapes -- I mean they have the largest selection of movies. Seriously. Perhaps that doesn't suprise you, but I've certainly never been anywhere on earth before where Blocbuster's selection would be considered comparatively good.
Of course, if your target market for a movie or game is bumblefuckville, you have much bigger problems than just distribution.
I agree -- why would this guy go to all the trouble of making a statement about the banality of high school's social order, and then turn around and beg to be re-admitted to that order?
If he really thought he was protesting something, he should be prepared to make the sacrifices protesting demands. In almost every case, the sacrifices as a result of the protest are much more important at swaying the popular opinion than the protest ever could be.
But I suspect the effort to expunge the record is just another part of the protest. Hopefully, he has no real desire to expunge the record, any more than he ever had any real desire to be homecoming king. Demanding that his record be expunged is just a way of milking more publicity out of the original protest act.
I realize the comparison wasn't fair, and I didn't intend that it should be taken very seriously. In fact, I find comparing operating systems on a "fragmentation" metric to be silly under even the best of circumstances. For many reason, Unix has always been a very fragmented set of operating systems. That fact has simultaneously been one of Unix's greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses.
My honest opionion is that Linux has gained an advantage over BSD by the very nature of its fragmentation (in distributions -- not in the kernel). Some of that advantage has been technical, but much of it has been social; the wide variety of linux has allowed just about everyone to find something in linux they like. Whether you're a l337 hacker trying to learn all the "arcane" options to "1337" commands like 'tar -xf && configure && make install', or an IBM executive trying to find a distribution to offer on workstations, or a software vendor hoping to escape the Microsoft hedgonomy, there is a Linux distribution made just for you.
It can also be argued that widespread linux buy-in has lead to a much wider variety of hardware and softare available to linux, making linux more flexible than BSD, and in some sense, technically superiour to BSD. This is dangerous arguement, however, as the same arguement leads us to believe that DOS is somehow superiour to both. In fact, the exact opposite may be true -- it is possible that an unfortunate side effect of a rush to popularity is a desire to provide a laundry list of desirable sounding items, instead of a short list of necessary items done correctly. Unfortunately, it also often true that broken things are talked about much more often than working things -- there is a strange correlation between popularity and brokeness that simply can't be ignored.
Unlike most people here, I do not believe "choice is good." At least, I do not believe it in the sense that it is often said -- I see no great advantage to being able to choose KDE or Gnome, or among a half dozen Java Virtual Machines, or among a dozen or so competing Linux distributions. But choice is very important in some cases. Different computers are used for different things. The demands placed on a farm of inexpensive webservers or a mail server are very, very different than the demands placed on a personal workstation, which are very different than the demands on a 365x24x7 SPF database server. Choice here is good. The option to choose the right tool for the task is very important. It does not matter much to me if I choose among two tools available for a job, which both do pretty much the same thing. It does matter to me if I can choose one good tool for one job, and another good tool for another job. This is where the choice between linux and BSD is good.
But there is another way to interpret choice; it can be interpreted as freedom. Its the kind of freedom that RMS keeps talking about -- the freedom to improve something that needs improving. BSD and linux are not so much about giving consumers a choice of operating systems (which is good, because they're not really interchangable), but instead about giving the developers a choice to develop what they feel needs developing. If I want BSD with SMP support, its entirely my choice to make a BSD with better SMP support. If I want a journaling filesystem, its entirely my choice to make a journaling file system. Its my choice.
This kind of choice really is what has led to both the fragmentation and vitality of Unix through the years. I would have to imagine that most of us on slashdot have had more accounts on more unix varients than we can count on our fingers and toes. We've all pulled our hair out over the differences. And we've all also realized that without every vendor being free to build their own thing, and copy each other, Unix would have stagnated and died long, long ago.
Yep. Only four BSD. Not fragmented at all. Jus four BSD: OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, BSD/OS... and Darwin.
Err, I mean five. Only five BSD. Still, BSD is not fragmented at all. Just five BSD: OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, BSD/OS, Darwin... and MacOS X.
OK. Only six BSD. Still, its not that fragmented. Only six BSD: OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, BSD/OS, Darwin, MacOSX... and 4.4 BSD Lite Mach Server.
Hmm... maybe I'll try again. Only seven BSD. If you squint, they're not fragmented at all. Just seven wafer thin BSD versions. Unless you count all the old BSD operating systems, like SunOS, Ultrix, NeXT step, etc. Only seven. Until tomorrow.
Yeah -- BSD isn't fragmented, and like you said, it never will be.
Just like you don't go breaking into a TV station to see how it works, you shouldn't go sneaking into people's sites to see how they work. It's exactly the same!
I couldn't agree more. And if you get cable, you shouldn't be looking at the scrambled stations, just to see if you can catch a glimpse of a boob. You will go to hell if you do that -- that boob is the intellectual property of the broadcasting station, and they wouldn't just broadcast it out to everyone. No, its a tightly controlled encrypted intellectual property boob, not to be reverse engineered or decrypted in any way, shape, or form, without the prior written consent of the intellectual property owner.
If you wouldn't just go look at a boob on tv, what makes you think you can look at other stuff in other places? No-one is giving you the right to just look around at stuff. Didn't you learn not to be curious about boobs and computers and all that other bad stuff in kindergarten? I sure did. Thats why I'm not going to hell, and you are.
Enter earnings here: ____
If I get a company car, is that earnings? If my company pays my health insurance, is that earnings? If I use half my house as a coffee shop, how much of my house payments count as a business expense? If my company gives me tuition re-imbursement, is that earnings? If I'm required to take continuing education classes to keep certifications required for my job, do I pay taxes on the money I spend? If I'm a pizza dilivery guy, and drive my own car, how much of my car expenses count as business expenses?
Do you think the question "how much do you earn" can always be answered by looking at a W-2 form? What do you imagine all those miles of tax codes are for, then?
I'll admit that the stuff like "stuff you get stolen from you can be knocked off your earnings" or "if you get sick and have to pay hospital bills, it gets knocked off your earnings" or "if you pay interest on your home, it gets knocked off your earnings" are mostly just fluff. But thats not where most of the complications seem to come from in the tax codes. Most of the complications come when you try to do anything non-traditional, and try to figure out your earnings at the end of the year.
why should Perl succeed where Lisp failed?
A gerbil could learn the Lisp syntax in about a half hour. I don't think I've ever met anyone who was aware of all the Perl syntax. (And I've met some smart people who use Perl a lot. If you think you understand Perl syntax, would you please annotate some of the more interesting perl poetry and abigail sigs, then explain it all to me?) So, naturally, Perl has a huge advantage over Lisp.
Let me explain. I get a warm fuzzy feeling every time I learn a new thing. Since I like to learn a lot of programming languages, its relatively easy for me to learn new syntax, and get that warm fuzzy feeling fairly often. For a language like Perl, I'm still getting that warm fuzzy feeling a few times a month, and its still suprisingly easy to get that glow.
Conversely, since Lisp pretty much has no syntax to speak of, I can only get that warm fuzzy glow by learning ideas much more complicated than syntax. I think I can safely say that anything is more complicated to learn than syntax -- anyone who knows more than a half dozen programming languages has almost undoubtedly taught him or herself how to learn new syntax very easily and quickly. The complicated stuff that Lisp makes possible to learn almost immediately is difficult and painful to learn. I personally can never learn more than one or two difficult ideas a week, and I the difficulty of learning it often overshadows that warm fuzzy glow I get from finally learning it.
In short, Perl is rewarding to learn, Lisp is not.
And before anyone mods me down as a troll or flamebait, understand that I am 100% serious about everything I've written here. I really do believe that most people learn new things for the intrinsic reward for learning it, and certain programming languages are popular precisely because they are so rewarding to learn. Similarly, many languages are unpopular because they aren't very rewarding to learn at all. But, what makes a language rewarding to learn often has suprisingly little to do with how elegant or powerful a language is.
these "frame rates" are what are probably causing me to lose chess matches online.
I'm sure they're also responsible for my miserable Karma.
Yeah! Now Linux has props! Now we can stick it to The Man! 'Cause once its been on Tee Vee, it becomes real!
No, the guy is not serious. At least, he's not serious in the way you think. In a previous post, he said he thought it was important to look through the Gnome source code to look for racism in the code itself (and not just in the comments, either... he wants to look for racist while loops). The guy clearly thinks he's joking.
Unfortunately, on some levels I suspect he's not joking. I wonder if he's not some guy with some subtle racial prejudices of his own. I think he's proping up straw men in front of some important issues. What he's done, I'm afraid, is to convince a small minority of people that he's actually defending the position he espouses, and those people can be led to mistakenly believe that those flimsly straw men are the real defenses for those positions.
Unfortunately, once you start to believe that there are only strawmen still carping about racism in the world, one quickly begins to shut out the real voices and real men who are talking about racism. In a subtle way, by arguing about racism, this tyrone fine character is really arguing against it.
In the end, the only defense against folks like Tyrone is to laugh at them, and failing that, to ignore them. But we can never, ever, believe that they really believe what they are saying. Arguing with them actual makes you weaker.
That's great. However, neither of those URL's are links to the study! Instead, they are links to and article about the study. I long ago gave up trying to piece together what any study might have been about by reading the garbage that some poorly informed reporter managed to bang out a few minutes before deadline on a friday afternoon.
Obviously, the internet has been a great boon to society. However, the truth is many internet "news" sites contain articles based on some half-cocked and poorly researched idea by some random author. Often, those articles are little more than trolls, posted to increase hits, or make the readers feel good about themselves (and increase hits). The odddest thing about this phenomenon is that it hasn't clued more people on the the fact that most "real" brick-and-mortar news sites have been doing exactly the same thing for hundreds of years.
If you read this AP article and thought you were getting information, you have been trolled by a brick and mortar news source. If you want real information, go read the actual study.
Just becuase you took one Intro to Psychology course 12 years ago, you're in no position to question Jon Katz and the collective wisdom of Slashdot. The minor trifling fact that the study is not on the Minneapolis Star Tribune website should not give you pause, or force you question the incredible depth of research that went into this story. Despite the fact that the only information we have on the study is the deranged ramblings of a probably confused AP reporter, you have no reason to question the validity of anything that Slashdot says, especially when what Slashdot says is so self-validating to so many of us in the geek community.
It is painfully clear to me that without the social interaction of the net, I would never realize the existance of Penis Birds, Hot Grits, or even Natelie Portman. I would also never spend my valuable time trolling on web logs, like I am doing right now. In short, the net has been an incredible boon to both myself, and many of the other members of slashdot, such as Anne Marie.
there's so much little hiss, noise, and brumm on analog stuff
The point is, no-one I know records on analog stuff anymore. I certainly don't, and my brother's garage band certainly doesn't. Heck, even my mom doesn't record on analog stuff anymore. The only analog thing left in my house may be my answering machine, and I'm not going to record anything important off that (unless I somehow get Carl Cassel to record my outgoing message).
Watermarking is going to have to work with home-brewed digital recording, or it will never be used by any of the early adopters, and it will never gain enough traction to get into normal users homes. Face it -- if you still record with analog, you're probably not going to run out and buy the latest watermark-enabled recording device, either. If you record digitally, you're not going to buy something that prevents you from using the stuff you legally create.
i mean, if it can be played, it can be recorded - and if the watermarking is done so that human can't hear it, then you can't hear it in the copy either.
Who cares if you can hear it? More to the point, why would you care if a computer could detect it? Until it becomes illegal to distribute programs that play audio without checking for watermarks, how is the presence of lack of a watermark going to affect me in any way?
Or will I have to retroactively add a watermark to my wedding video, before I can edit it on my computer? If my brother sends me a CD of his garage band, will I have to take it down to Media Play or Barnes and Noble to get watermarked before I can listen to it on my stereo? If e-mail a recording of my kid saying "mama" off to my relatives, are they going to have to visit www.riaa.com to get a license to listen to the e-mail?
If someone can distribute a player that doesn't care about the water marks in any of those sound files, why would that player care about the watermarks in the latest Britney Augilara CD?
I must be missing something fundemental about watermarking here. Unless I suddenly find myself in a world where the only audio I listen to are those sounds pre-approved by one of the major record labels, one hundred percent of the stuff I send around is going to be home-brewed audio. And any program or hardware that makes it more inconvenient to listen to that home-brewed audio isn't going to make it into my house, and it isn't going to make it into the house of anyone I know.