>> How can a person be held accountable for the actions of others, especially when there is no proof of who did what?"
Wrong question. The courts would ask:
"Why should a person not be held responsible for knowingly operating a facility by which he knowingly allowed users to engage in illegal acts?"
If you had reason to believe your users were illegal copying files, and you took no action to stop them, then you, it seems to me, can be held accountable.
Geez, read the thread. I am asserting that technology will soon make it impossible to transfer an unauthorized copy from one machine to another machine. So, even if you can make a copy of a file on your machine, you won't be able to distribute it to other machines because those new machines will not allow it to be written to permanent storage.
And, remember, making illegal analog copies is, nad always has beenm known as counterfeiting. That's exactly what we should be calling illegal digital copies, but filesharing thieves pretend that the fact that they use the Internet to distribute their stolen goods makes it different.
Colleges, like the rest of society, expect students to behave in accord with established standards, or face the consequences. Violate those standards -- steal test questions, set fire to the library, etc. -- and you will be held responsible for your behavior.
There's no reason why behavior with a computer should be exempt.
If some college kid physically damaged hardware in his school's server farm and took the network down, the school might very well sue him to recover their financial losses.
Likewise, any student who deliberately releases a virus, worm, etc., on a school network ought to be held financially responsible for the damage.
Schools (and any other institutions) should establish "standards of behavior" (e.g., required protective software, avoidance of banner servers, etc.) and hold students who violate those standards responsible for their share of the damages.
Being a closed standard doesn't make Apple a monopoly. Apple maintains that level of control as a business decision, to maximize their profit. That's what businesses are created to do. If Apple thought they'd make more money by going to an open standard, odds are they would.
>> As long as songs can be heard by ANYONE, and movies seen by ANYONE.. they will always be pirated.
I think you're wrong, and that the technical means to prevent authorized transfer of digital files will be avilable fairly soon. That won;t stop somone from digitizing analog content, but it will stop them from distributing the illegal copy.
But, in the end, so long as some people lack moral character, they will pirate things that don;t belong to them. The world is full of people who happily trade character for rationalization.
Wrong. I said "BIOS or something else". It is the embedding of the magic number that's important, not how it gets done. One other approach that comes to mind is putting this functionality in chips. You might ignore the BIOS, you might write your own OS, but you will still need those chips. In an case, their are ways to do it.
Whether or not the "Internet is completely hosted in the US." is irrelevant. If my machine blocks the transfer of a file because the file was duplicated on a machine that did not embed an acceptable magic number within the file, then my machine could be on the Moon for all the difference it would make.
In time, and not much time, countries will begin to consider the "Internet" as a public resource about which they can legislate. Certainly, there's ample precedent in many countries for legislation to be enacted based simply on the fact that federal or national funds help finance an activity. (Think federal funds going to local schools in the U.S.)
In other words, in the U.S., we will see legislation mandating use of certain technologies and outlawing certain behaviors on any public network that contains any nodes or sections that receive any amount of federal money.
If a BIOS, or something else, generates a unique magic number that is embedded in every file copied on a machine, and if that same BIOS running on another machine blocks transfer of any file that doesn't contain a "legal" magic number, then the industry will have effectively blocked the transfer and copying of unauthorized files from one machine to another, even over a network.
Couple this with legislation mandating use of this technology on public networks, i.e., the Internet, and things will be rather sewn up.
Apple sells personal computers. The differences between a Mac and a PC are tantamount to the differences between a Ford and a Buick. I.e., minsicule. Would you argue that Ford has a monopoly on cars? Would you argue that Ford has an obligation to allow others to make and sell cars bearing the Ford logo?
Your logic would have us conclude that every company that is the sole manufacturer of a specific brand is a monopoly. That, for example, Intel has a monopoly on Intel chips, AMD on AMD chips, Hershey's chocolate on Hershey Bars, etc. That'd would be wrong. Those are brands, not monopolies. There are lots of places to buy chips and chocolate bars. Ditto personal computers.
>>...to send out your business document to people and not worry about them leaking it and spreading it to third parties.
That alone could drive sales. People want security and accountability more than they do free movies and free music. If your income depends on the security of your PC, your network, and your online behavior, this will be a no-brainer.
>> Why would OEMs buy something that would piss off their customers?
Because it won't. Corporate, institutional and government customers --who have every reason to worry a lot about what happens on their networks -- will love this kind of BIOS. The home market either won't care or will need it to access the boss's network from home, and the geek market is to small to care about.
Uh-uh. He seems to be saying (and I certainly am saying) that the content industry will eventually find a way to make unauthorized copying technically impossible.
This kind of DRM'd BIOS seems a good start, in that it could be used to block the transfer of files from one machine to another.
The water belonged to someone else. They took it without permission. That's theft.
Re:Internet, power, water... it is all good
on
MIT Roofnet
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
>>...my wife's grandparents live right next to a gold course and one of their neighbors got busted a few years back for tapping into their water lines and using them for their lawn. Can you really blame them...
Sure, I can blame them. They stole the water. Morality isn't measured on a sliding scale that gives you a pass if you steal something that is both tempting and available. Your wife's grandparents, I think, displayed a lack of moral character.
>>...astronauts work on missions is very, very robot-like. Everything is scheduled, months in advance.
Aside from the fact that working to a schedule doesn't make you a robot, that scenario, to the degree it is accurate, only fits the Shuttle and ISS. Remember, we've been putting people in orbit for 40 years and on space stations since the 1970's. Nothing much new happening there.
But, make the location elsewhere in space, and I'll pick a thinking human any time. (I have this vision of a robotic Mars lander, programmed to test for the presence of water and biologic byproducts, ignoring a little bug that goes crawling by...)
>> The only problem I have is expendable had better not mean leave in space which would be bad. And, recoverable for recycling would be nice, why waste all that metal. Reusable is ideal, but may be more costly than making a new one, and recycling the old.
Assuming two approaches meet requirements, I think the emphasis should be on cost. I think the Shuttle, and a series of aborted follow-on efforts, have made the case that winged reusable craft are currently not cheaper than expendable boosters. This may change in the future.
That excerpt is honest and accurate. I'm glad the board hard the courage to keep it in.
It would be interesting to compare the estimated costs of NASA's orginal vision with what has been spent on the Shuttle.
While Johnson would not have backed off the Apollo program (that would have been tantamount to scuttling one of JFK's legacies), he certainly wanted to spend money in Vietnam. As for Nixon, I give credence to the notion that he didn't want to support an effort he identified with the Kennedy's.
On a side note, every time I hear someone argue that we should take the space budget and spend it on Earthly needs, I want to counter: Stop spending money to kill each other and there will be plenty enough money to go around.
Well, "gas station" isn't the right fit. I was thinking aout political and social battles to come over nuclear fuel. Some of the clamor, and real risk, might be avoided if we do as much processing in orbit as possible.
The reaons for manned spaceflight are every bitas justifiable as the reasons for your existence.
Space travel is not about doing science in space. Space travel is about putting people in space, in a fashion directly comparable to human migration from Africa and our colonizing the planet.
Today's efforts in space parallel some distant ancestors' attempt to build the first boats. Presumably, most of the first boats sunk, and lots of people drowned or came close. Surely, ther must have been Luddites on the shore exclaiming "You don't need to do that!"
If people don't travel in space, then all the robots are pointless. As far as I'm concerned, human space travel is the only thing the race has done in my lifetime that makes me proud to be human. People who want to stay home provoke another emotion.
I'm aware of the cross-range requirement. NASA willingly took on those putative DoD requirements in order to acquire the Pentagon's support in Congress and with OMB. Once they'd locked themselves into that design, the military jumped ship.
I'm not against wings per se; I just want to use the cheapest, safest and simplest way to get to LEO. No one has demonstrated, yet, that wings are the way to go. At this point, I can't support spending more money on solving the wrong problem
Slashdot Mirror
>> How can a person be held accountable for the actions of others, especially when there is no proof of who did what?"
Wrong question. The courts would ask:
"Why should a person not be held responsible for knowingly operating a facility by which he knowingly allowed users to engage in illegal acts?"
If you had reason to believe your users were illegal copying files, and you took no action to stop them, then you, it seems to me, can be held accountable.
Geez, read the thread. I am asserting that technology will soon make it impossible to transfer an unauthorized copy from one machine to another machine. So, even if you can make a copy of a file on your machine, you won't be able to distribute it to other machines because those new machines will not allow it to be written to permanent storage.
And, remember, making illegal analog copies is, nad always has beenm known as counterfeiting. That's exactly what we should be calling illegal digital copies, but filesharing thieves pretend that the fact that they use the Internet to distribute their stolen goods makes it different.
Nah. But there's no reason why someone in college should be held to less of a standard than someone who's not in college.
Colleges, like the rest of society, expect students to behave in accord with established standards, or face the consequences. Violate those standards -- steal test questions, set fire to the library, etc. -- and you will be held responsible for your behavior.
There's no reason why behavior with a computer should be exempt.
If some college kid physically damaged hardware in his school's server farm and took the network down, the school might very well sue him to recover their financial losses.
Likewise, any student who deliberately releases a virus, worm, etc., on a school network ought to be held financially responsible for the damage.
Schools (and any other institutions) should establish "standards of behavior" (e.g., required protective software, avoidance of banner servers, etc.) and hold students who violate those standards responsible for their share of the damages.
Being a closed standard doesn't make Apple a monopoly. Apple maintains that level of control as a business decision, to maximize their profit. That's what businesses are created to do. If Apple thought they'd make more money by going to an open standard, odds are they would.
>> As long as songs can be heard by ANYONE, and movies seen by ANYONE.. they will always be pirated.
I think you're wrong, and that the technical means to prevent authorized transfer of digital files will be avilable fairly soon. That won;t stop somone from digitizing analog content, but it will stop them from distributing the illegal copy.
But, in the end, so long as some people lack moral character, they will pirate things that don;t belong to them. The world is full of people who happily trade character for rationalization.
Wrong. I said "BIOS or something else". It is the embedding of the magic number that's important, not how it gets done. One other approach that comes to mind is putting this functionality in chips. You might ignore the BIOS, you might write your own OS, but you will still need those chips. In an case, their are ways to do it.
Whether or not the "Internet is completely hosted in the US." is irrelevant. If my machine blocks the transfer of a file because the file was duplicated on a machine that did not embed an acceptable magic number within the file, then my machine could be on the Moon for all the difference it would make.
In time, and not much time, countries will begin to consider the "Internet" as a public resource about which they can legislate. Certainly, there's ample precedent in many countries for legislation to be enacted based simply on the fact that federal or national funds help finance an activity. (Think federal funds going to local schools in the U.S.)
In other words, in the U.S., we will see legislation mandating use of certain technologies and outlawing certain behaviors on any public network that contains any nodes or sections that receive any amount of federal money.
If a BIOS, or something else, generates a unique magic number that is embedded in every file copied on a machine, and if that same BIOS running on another machine blocks transfer of any file that doesn't contain a "legal" magic number, then the industry will have effectively blocked the transfer and copying of unauthorized files from one machine to another, even over a network.
Couple this with legislation mandating use of this technology on public networks, i.e., the Internet, and things will be rather sewn up.
>> And as such is a monopoly.
That's a lame and shopworn piece of bogosity.
Apple sells personal computers. The differences between a Mac and a PC are tantamount to the differences between a Ford and a Buick. I.e., minsicule. Would you argue that Ford has a monopoly on cars? Would you argue that Ford has an obligation to allow others to make and sell cars bearing the Ford logo?
Your logic would have us conclude that every company that is the sole manufacturer of a specific brand is a monopoly. That, for example, Intel has a monopoly on Intel chips, AMD on AMD chips, Hershey's chocolate on Hershey Bars, etc. That'd would be wrong. Those are brands, not monopolies. There are lots of places to buy chips and chocolate bars. Ditto personal computers.
>> ...to send out your business document to people and not worry about them leaking it and spreading it to third parties.
That alone could drive sales. People want security and accountability more than they do free movies and free music. If your income depends on the security of your PC, your network, and your online behavior, this will be a no-brainer.
>> Why would OEMs buy something that would piss off their customers?
Because it won't. Corporate, institutional and government customers --who have every reason to worry a lot about what happens on their networks -- will love this kind of BIOS. The home market either won't care or will need it to access the boss's network from home, and the geek market is to small to care about.
Uh-uh. He seems to be saying (and I certainly am saying) that the content industry will eventually find a way to make unauthorized copying technically impossible.
This kind of DRM'd BIOS seems a good start, in that it could be used to block the transfer of files from one machine to another.
>> Haven't you seen how many books about wizards and dragons are in the sci fi section of the bookstore?
Yeah. I wish shops would put the fantasy books on their own shelves, so I can ignore them.
Didn't you know? Everything that happens on Earth is planned and controlled by the Evil Minions of Emporer Ming.
I'm guessing your parents kept asking you "Is that really necessary?"
Sawyer deserves this. Nice to see recognition going to a writer who can build real stories around real characters.
How cute.
Water is a scarce resource, and hardly free.
The water belonged to someone else. They took it without permission. That's theft.
>> ...my wife's grandparents live right next to a gold course and one of their neighbors got busted a few years back for tapping into their water lines and using them for their lawn. Can you really blame them...
Sure, I can blame them. They stole the water. Morality isn't measured on a sliding scale that gives you a pass if you steal something that is both tempting and available. Your wife's grandparents, I think, displayed a lack of moral character.
For someone in, say, India, a better headline might be:
"The Unstoppable Flow of IT Jobs To Us"
Just another reminder of the artificiality of borders.
>> ...astronauts work on missions is very, very robot-like. Everything is scheduled, months in advance.
Aside from the fact that working to a schedule doesn't make you a robot, that scenario, to the degree it is accurate, only fits the Shuttle and ISS. Remember, we've been putting people in orbit for 40 years and on space stations since the 1970's. Nothing much new happening there.
But, make the location elsewhere in space, and I'll pick a thinking human any time. (I have this vision of a robotic Mars lander, programmed to test for the presence of water and biologic byproducts, ignoring a little bug that goes crawling by...)
>>
The only problem I have is expendable had better not mean leave in space which would be bad. And, recoverable for recycling would be nice, why waste all that metal. Reusable is ideal, but may be more costly than making a new one, and recycling the old.
Assuming two approaches meet requirements, I think the emphasis should be on cost. I think the Shuttle, and a series of aborted follow-on efforts, have made the case that winged reusable craft are currently not cheaper than expendable boosters. This may change in the future.
That excerpt is honest and accurate. I'm glad the board hard the courage to keep it in.
It would be interesting to compare the estimated costs of NASA's orginal vision with what has been spent on the Shuttle.
While Johnson would not have backed off the Apollo program (that would have been tantamount to scuttling one of JFK's legacies), he certainly wanted to spend money in Vietnam. As for Nixon, I give credence to the notion that he didn't want to support an effort he identified with the Kennedy's.
On a side note, every time I hear someone argue that we should take the space budget and spend it on Earthly needs, I want to counter: Stop spending money to kill each other and there will be plenty enough money to go around.
Well, "gas station" isn't the right fit. I was thinking aout political and social battles to come over nuclear fuel. Some of the clamor, and real risk, might be avoided if we do as much processing in orbit as possible.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I'm aware of the military's putative cross-range requirement.
NASA's designs always included wings. The wings just got bigger when they needed DOD's clout in the budget wars.
Wrong.
The reaons for manned spaceflight are every bitas justifiable as the reasons for your existence.
Space travel is not about doing science in space. Space travel is about putting people in space, in a fashion directly comparable to human migration from Africa and our colonizing the planet.
Today's efforts in space parallel some distant ancestors' attempt to build the first boats. Presumably, most of the first boats sunk, and lots of people drowned or came close. Surely, ther must have been Luddites on the shore exclaiming "You don't need to do that!"
If people don't travel in space, then all the robots are pointless. As far as I'm concerned, human space travel is the only thing the race has done in my lifetime that makes me proud to be human. People who want to stay home provoke another emotion.
I'm aware of the cross-range requirement. NASA willingly took on those putative DoD requirements in order to acquire the Pentagon's support in Congress and with OMB. Once they'd locked themselves into that design, the military jumped ship.
I'm not against wings per se; I just want to use the cheapest, safest and simplest way to get to LEO. No one has demonstrated, yet, that wings are the way to go. At this point, I can't support spending more money on solving the wrong problem