I posted this earlier and it got eaten. Anyway, here are *TWO* ideas for screwing Digital Convergence:
Idea #1: Digital Convergence just announced an IPO. We can do our part on internet investment discussion boards to make sure that their potential investors are well-informed about this company... every day until the IPO!
DC gives away hardware and expects revenue from use of its software. However, since its software stinks and is easily replaced, the business model is hosed.
A recent letter from the president of the technology group at DC shows a total lack of understanding of IP law-- upon which the health of the company critically depends. (Or would depend, were the law favorable to their cause.)
Apparently realizing the enormity of their error, DC has been sending vague, threatening letters to people who have found uses for CueCat that undermine their business model. Unfortunately, these letters appear to be bluffs.
These threatening letters have incensed the open source community-- a group well-qualified to undermine DC's business model by providing alternate software to drive the CueCat, shutting of DC's revenue.
A key asset that Digital Convergence hopes to develop is a database of demographic data through the barcode scans. However, the true value of this supposed asset is essentially zero, because it can be (and likely will be) easily and irreparably corrupted. (See Idea #2.)
Just as the company's fundamental business model has come into serious question, they file for an IPO. Could this be a hasty attempt by execs to grab some cash before this leaky ship sinks beneath the waves?
Be sure to relay only FACTS on internet discussion boards-- that will suffice. Of course, wouldn't it be a shame if frank and extensive discussion of these facts cut a few percent off their $100 million IPO?
Idea #2: Since Digital Convergence plans to build a database of demographic data, how about a little program that pulls random items out of the UBC database, encodes them, and ships them off to the DC servers every couple minutes? This would irreparably corrupt their database, making it worthless-- weeding out fake scans would be essentially impossible. If you're worried about legality, print out 10 pages of barcodes for obscure items you'd never own or desire and scan them again and again whenever you have an idly thinking about something else. That way, you're using their product exactly as intended, yet still corrupting their database. What can they do?
We all have bad habits that are hard to break. Perhaps you could try calling people "dolt" as a transitional word.
At one level, you're right: at some point, individuals and companies have no more money left to give to lawyers. But this is the problem-- that is the only limit.
Weighing costs and benefits is never easy or exact or free of dubious side-considerations. That's life. "Fantastic, rational, incorruptible" are your words, not mine. Your alternative to doing the best we can would be...? (See, I've kicked my bad habit.)
Meaningful legal reform based on cost-benefit analysis might entail, for example, scaling back discovery, penalizing harassment suits, barring lawsuits outright in more situations, or redirecting punitive damages to public coffers. (And if so many companies prefer to arbitrate rather than litigate, then perhaps litigation could take some cues from arbitration?) Each is hotly debatable, of course, but the trial lawyers lobby works effectively to stifle the very idea of weighing costs of legal procedures against the benefits in justice and social order. They prefer your model-- people should simply pay lawyers until they're bled white. Now, I wonder why that would be?
Here's my beef with the legal profession: there is no balance.
In most spheres of life, resources devoted are weighed against benefits gained. For example, money goes to NASA or education or defense based on price-return deliberations in Congress. Or, using your first example, money goes to bakers only to the extent that people hunger for their goods. More recently, HMOs and insurers have enforced cost-benefit calculations on the medical field.
But the logic of cost-benefit has yet to arrive in the legal sphere. There is no checking force on the flood of money going into lawyers' pockets, as there is for bakers (since people desire only so much food) or defense contractors (where we weigh military need against cost) or doctors (where insurers have strict limits on what they will pay for). With this absence of cost-benefit thinking, barriers to litigation are now at toe-stub height, procedures once a case begins are grossly protracted, and consequently the legal profession has become a black hole for society's resources.
So, sure, we need legal recourse to have a stable society. But many of us feel that we've gone far, far beyond that level of litigation.
I am glad that Slashdot is covering this matter closely.
Volunteer software developers are personally vulnerable to legal assault in a way that corporate developers never are. Most of us routinely rely on the contributions of such individuals, even if not for something as esoteric as barcode scanners in particular. I believe that there is a reciprocal community responsibility not to let Michael Rothwell and others who work without compensation for the public benefit be mugged in the dark by lawyers and forgotten.
I'm glad Slashdot is keeping a bright light shining on the matter.
you believe in copyrights only when it suits you. you sure don't like it when people violate the gpl, but you don't mind posting mp3s of copyrighted music on napster.
This seems to be the standard-issue complaint. Here's the standard-issue reply:
The problem is not intellectual propery law per se. The GPL ensures wide, free, and open distribution of software. By contrast, RIAA uses copyright law to extort every last penny from consumers, musicians, blank media producers, mp3.com, napster, etc. Thus, the GPL serves the public good and harms no one, while RIAA abuses copyright to enrich fat men in LA and exploit everyone else.
As I recall, Digital Convergence did not hestitate to fire off bogus legal threats. This is no "good will" to abuse.
They have a busines plan with a hole large enough to float the USS Truman through. Namely, they hope to profit from a service that can easily be obtained elsewhere for free. They're trying to cover this gaping hole with legal intimidation.
An altruistic outfit might reasonably expect a somewhat altruistic public response. But once the lawyer threats start, forget it.
The MPAA hasn't stopped distribution of the DeCSS source, but I think they've successfully chilled development of the tools DeCSS should spawn, players aside:
Extract images from a DVD and make them into screen backgrounds or screen savers.
Extract reduced-size clips for review purposes.
Extract the soundtrack.
If DeCSS just sits there unused on 75,000 hard drives, the MPAA has won. The next move should not be further, somewhat pointless distribution of the source, but distribution of players and neat tools using DeCSS. If we don't move forward, we lose.
Will the CD-ROM drives that allowed Digital Audio Extraction kill the CD market? Will MP3 do it either?
WE CAN DREAM, CAN'T WE?!
Seriously, these technologies are not "okay" because the music and film industries will still rake in bucketloads of money despite them. Rather, they are "okay", period-- even if Jack Valenti and Edgar Bronfman are left sharing a tin of tuna warmeded over a back-alley fire. Sorry, dreaming again.
Let's pass a law requiring a tithe to the MPAA. They can just dock 10% directly from the salary of every American. (Australians to follow.) That would be so much simpler than the tax on blank videotapes or making us pay for extra crypto hardware on HDTVs.
The remarkable thing about this article is the number of on-target replies. This is a techie-nerd site, right? But I read post after post making careful distinctions about intellectual property law, weighing obscure precedents, quoting the U. S. code. Certainly, there is still abundant need for "IANAL" around here, but the level of legal sophistication on Slashdot has grown immensely in recent months.
This story sounds very fishy. There are just too many oddities:
The Canadian news story says:
CSIS spokesman Dan Lambert said yesterday, however, that the service conducted its own in-depth review in 1991 and found that it had no copies of Promis, bootlegged or otherwise, and never had. (CNN left this out.)
The Canadian account: A U.S. government independent counsel in 1993 found no credible evidence to support Inslaw's allegations. The counsel, retired judge Nicholas Bua, said the company relied on witnesses who had credibility problems, including a former computer expert who is serving a sentence on drug charges and an Israeli who changed his story. (CNN omits this.)
A site quoted earlier with extensive details on the case has a veneer of credibility, until it starts to fold in the CIA, contras, Jimmy Hoffa, murders of native Americans, ex-green berets, etc. Pins the wack-o-meter.
Most everything seems to stem from statements by one guy, a Michael J. Riconoscuito (the one with drug charges). If you think he's a nut, as the independent counsel did, then we can all move along.
Complex software shouldn't be that easy to pirate and reinstall on computer systems around the world, should it? These high-ranking Justice Department officials were sitting around copying 3.5" floppies and photocopying manuals, were they? "Jist cuz its kewl, man!" Don't they have day jobs over there at Justice, after all?
Some of the countries that supposedly holding bootleg copies-- Iraq and Libya-- aren't English-speaking. What gives?
What does this amazing software do? It was supposedly made for the US dept of justice to track cases. But-- oh!-- the Candian Intelligence Service just had to have it. And we're told, "The software could have been used in the recent Persian Gulf War to track U.S. and allied troop movements." Man, that is one amazing piece of code!
Furthermore, the software was written around 1990. Who is updating it for new hardware and fixing bugs, if the company producing it went bankrupt nearly a decade ago? But the software is so good that it keeps on chugging along?
Whether you consider nuclear power or coal burning safer depends on your values.
Coal-burning has killed tens of thousands, but they're poor, uneducated rural miners. Screw 'em!
But nuclear power could kill us wealthy, college-educated urbanites. It's "Evil"!
Try this experiment on your local anti-nuclear activist:
Get them to tell you all about Three Mile Island, the worst civilian nuclear accident in the United States (where no one died). Let them really gush.
Then ask them about, say, the disaster at the Willow Creek coal mine last month (collapse/fire/explosion with two killed, eight hospitalized). Expect a blank look.
So are you really anti-nuclear to save human life or, more precisely, to save elite techie yuppie lives in exchange for the deaths of faceless mine workers?
"Let's use wind and solar and flower power!" is a bogus cop-out. For a couple decades, nuclear and coal are the main, available options. Pick one.
I'm amazed at how low these prices are. These fees are not supporting any corporations. That's chump change! The suit alone cost like $4 million. Is this really what they're fighting for?
Meteorological stations (the weather guages) in the 19th century were boxes stuck out on poles in the middle of a field. Meteorological stations in the 21st century are boxes stuck out on poles in the middle of an airport tarmac.
This is standard canard. The main component (70%) is measurements over the sea surface. Further, most warming has occurred since 1980-- long after the effect you cite should have appeared. Be careful; the petrochemical industry spends a lot of money spreading such "commonsense" nonsense.
Or what about the ozone hole? [...] And we have no theory today to explain why it subsequently shrunk.
Our lack of understanding is my point, but... this from the 1998 WMO/UNEP Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion: "The large ozone losses in the Southern Hemisphere polar region during spring continued unabated with approximately the same magnitude and areal extent as in the early 1990s. [...] These ozone changes are consistent overall with our understanding of chemistry and dynamics."
All I know for sure is that the Mount Pinatubo eruption last decade released more CO2 into the atmosphere in one week then the entire history of human industry.
Pure invention. Here are global CO2 levels as measured at the Muana Loa observatory. No discontinuity due to Pinatubo's 1992 eruption. (You're probably thinking of SO2, but you're still overstating.)
Human-caused CO2 increases are certain. Global warming is certain. The first should cause the second. But conceivably we're missing something, the CO2 increases are not causing global warming, and coincidentally some unknown, natural force is the real cause. It's possible. But odds of even, say, 1 in 10 that we're hosing the planet should perhaps give one pause.
These are all well below normal, and covers a good part of the US, I wonder what the rest of the world is reporting.
From NOAA:
Global surface temperatures were much above average in July [2000]. The combined land and ocean temperature anomaly was +0.33C above the 1880-1999 long-term mean. This was the 7th warmest July since 1880, 0.36C cooler than the record temperature recorded during the later stages of the 1997/1998 warm phase of ENSO (El Nino). July land surface temperatures were the 6th warmest on record (+0.49C above average).
what is happening due to plate movement and such is that more water is going in then coming out, so all this water is now building at the north pole
Plate movement rates are 2 to 12 centimeters per year. This is not causing a massive water buildup at the pole or altering currents on a human time scale.
Global warming is a certainty. Here is an excerpt from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's 1999 climate review:
The Global mean temperature for 1999 was the 5th warmest on record since 1880. The warmest and second warmest years were 1998 and 1997. The top 6 warmest years have been in the 1990's. Each year of this decade has been one of the top 15 warmest of the century.
Certainly, some climate changes happen naturally. However, it would be quite a coincidence if this rapid change had a natural cause at just the time that an obvious man-made cause appears: elevated atmospheric CO2 levels.
If there is one fact to know about the global environment, it is this: we have no clue. Water at the pole is not the first surprise. For decades, we poured out chemicals that appeared safe; they were non-flammable, non-corrosive, non-toxic, non-reactive-- what could be better? Well, in 1974 Molina and Rowland pointed out that these chemicals, CFCs, destroy stratospheric ozone, potentially allowing UV to devastate crops worldwide (not to mention causing skin cancer). Imagine the surprise: sometime totally inocuous like spray deoderant could devastate all life on earth. What a thought. It was like discovering that salsa causes tectonic instability. We had no clue. Since CFCs are stable enough to survive in the atmosphere for decades, estimates are that ozone levels will not return to normal until about 2050. That is, I will probably never live one day on this earth with a normal ozone layer.
But then everyone spent 10 years collecting data and running sophisticated computer models, and we got on top of the problem. Cool, right? Except that in 1985 the massive ozone hole over Antarctica was discovered. Totally unexpected. Didn't show in any computer model. No one had any idea why a hole should appear there instead of, say, over the continental US. After all that study, still we had no clue.
There is no reason to expect the global warming phenomena to be any more predictable than ozone depletion has been. In all likelihood, our CO2 emissions amount to a rampaging charge to fundamentally alter our entire planet. The eventual outcome? We have no clue.
No, that's only if ice on land melts (e.g. on Antarctica or Greenland). If ice at sea melts, the water level doesn't rise. Put an ice cube in a glass of water. When it melts, the water level stays the same.
The RIAA argument is that propping up the retail price is altruistic, since the wholesale price-- their take-- is fixed.
Bogus.
If retailers competed on price, they would immediately pressure for wholesale discounts to make a profit. How long would those "fixed wholesale prices" last if Wal-Mart said, "Label A: Give us $1/CD off and we'll give you more shelf space than Label B"?
Do you think CNN or ABC or any professional news network would EVER allow such a comment to be aired?
Yes, actually. Here's ABC News commentator David Brinkley on Clinton's reelection:
"We all look forward with great pleasure to four years of wonderful, inspiring speeches, full of wit, poetry, music, love, and affection plus more goddamn nonsense."
Brinkley criticized Clinton's victory speech as "one of the worst things I've ever heard."
He noted that Clinton, "has not a creative bone in his body. Therefore, he's a bore and will always be a bore."
The first strategy is to encrypt very significant values in memory at all times. [...] A communicative [?] function such as XOR is your friend here, as it alters values upon storing, restores them upon reading, and is extremely fast. The whole point is to make it very hard for the hacker to find the variables he is searching for in the first place. Values the hacker would know to look for are not left around so that a simple scan can find them.
Take two images, XOR them, and search for the change in the key variable instead. *Splat!*
Slashdot Mirror
I posted this earlier and it got eaten. Anyway, here are *TWO* ideas for screwing Digital Convergence:
Idea #1: Digital Convergence just announced an IPO. We can do our part on internet investment discussion boards to make sure that their potential investors are well-informed about this company... every day until the IPO!
Be sure to relay only FACTS on internet discussion boards-- that will suffice. Of course, wouldn't it be a shame if frank and extensive discussion of these facts cut a few percent off their $100 million IPO?
Idea #2: Since Digital Convergence plans to build a database of demographic data, how about a little program that pulls random items out of the UBC database, encodes them, and ships them off to the DC servers every couple minutes? This would irreparably corrupt their database, making it worthless-- weeding out fake scans would be essentially impossible. If you're worried about legality, print out 10 pages of barcodes for obscure items you'd never own or desire and scan them again and again whenever you have an idly thinking about something else. That way, you're using their product exactly as intended, yet still corrupting their database. What can they do?
We all have bad habits that are hard to break. Perhaps you could try calling people "dolt" as a transitional word.
At one level, you're right: at some point, individuals and companies have no more money left to give to lawyers. But this is the problem-- that is the only limit.
Weighing costs and benefits is never easy or exact or free of dubious side-considerations. That's life. "Fantastic, rational, incorruptible" are your words, not mine. Your alternative to doing the best we can would be...? (See, I've kicked my bad habit.)
Meaningful legal reform based on cost-benefit analysis might entail, for example, scaling back discovery, penalizing harassment suits, barring lawsuits outright in more situations, or redirecting punitive damages to public coffers. (And if so many companies prefer to arbitrate rather than litigate, then perhaps litigation could take some cues from arbitration?) Each is hotly debatable, of course, but the trial lawyers lobby works effectively to stifle the very idea of weighing costs of legal procedures against the benefits in justice and social order. They prefer your model-- people should simply pay lawyers until they're bled white. Now, I wonder why that would be?
Here's my beef with the legal profession: there is no balance.
In most spheres of life, resources devoted are weighed against benefits gained. For example, money goes to NASA or education or defense based on price-return deliberations in Congress. Or, using your first example, money goes to bakers only to the extent that people hunger for their goods. More recently, HMOs and insurers have enforced cost-benefit calculations on the medical field.
But the logic of cost-benefit has yet to arrive in the legal sphere. There is no checking force on the flood of money going into lawyers' pockets, as there is for bakers (since people desire only so much food) or defense contractors (where we weigh military need against cost) or doctors (where insurers have strict limits on what they will pay for). With this absence of cost-benefit thinking, barriers to litigation are now at toe-stub height, procedures once a case begins are grossly protracted, and consequently the legal profession has become a black hole for society's resources.
So, sure, we need legal recourse to have a stable society. But many of us feel that we've gone far, far beyond that level of litigation.
I am glad that Slashdot is covering this matter closely.
Volunteer software developers are personally vulnerable to legal assault in a way that corporate developers never are. Most of us routinely rely on the contributions of such individuals, even if not for something as esoteric as barcode scanners in particular. I believe that there is a reciprocal community responsibility not to let Michael Rothwell and others who work without compensation for the public benefit be mugged in the dark by lawyers and forgotten.
I'm glad Slashdot is keeping a bright light shining on the matter.
The parent is an important post that deserves to be moderated up.
you believe in copyrights only when it suits you. you sure don't like it when people violate the gpl, but you don't mind posting mp3s of copyrighted music on napster.
This seems to be the standard-issue complaint. Here's the standard-issue reply:
The problem is not intellectual propery law per se. The GPL ensures wide, free, and open distribution of software. By contrast, RIAA uses copyright law to extort every last penny from consumers, musicians, blank media producers, mp3.com, napster, etc. Thus, the GPL serves the public good and harms no one, while RIAA abuses copyright to enrich fat men in LA and exploit everyone else.
As I recall, Digital Convergence did not hestitate to fire off bogus legal threats. This is no "good will" to abuse.
They have a busines plan with a hole large enough to float the USS Truman through. Namely, they hope to profit from a service that can easily be obtained elsewhere for free. They're trying to cover this gaping hole with legal intimidation.
An altruistic outfit might reasonably expect a somewhat altruistic public response. But once the lawyer threats start, forget it.
On the money.
The MPAA hasn't stopped distribution of the DeCSS source, but I think they've successfully chilled development of the tools DeCSS should spawn, players aside:
If DeCSS just sits there unused on 75,000 hard drives, the MPAA has won. The next move should not be further, somewhat pointless distribution of the source, but distribution of players and neat tools using DeCSS. If we don't move forward, we lose.
Did the VCR destroy the movie industry?
Sadly, no.
Did the tape recorder destroy the music industry?
Um... no. *Damn*
Did CD Burners kill the CD music business?
Nooooo! *SOB* Cease your cruel, cruel taunts!
Will the CD-ROM drives that allowed Digital Audio Extraction kill the CD market? Will MP3 do it either?
WE CAN DREAM, CAN'T WE?!
Seriously, these technologies are not "okay" because the music and film industries will still rake in bucketloads of money despite them. Rather, they are "okay", period-- even if Jack Valenti and Edgar Bronfman are left sharing a tin of tuna warmeded over a back-alley fire. Sorry, dreaming again.
Let's pass a law requiring a tithe to the MPAA. They can just dock 10% directly from the salary of every American. (Australians to follow.) That would be so much simpler than the tax on blank videotapes or making us pay for extra crypto hardware on HDTVs.
It is warming.
The proper cryptographic access control for your DeCSS source code is this awesome thing called CSS.
The complications make me giddy. :-)
The remarkable thing about this article is the number of on-target replies. This is a techie-nerd site, right? But I read post after post making careful distinctions about intellectual property law, weighing obscure precedents, quoting the U. S. code. Certainly, there is still abundant need for "IANAL" around here, but the level of legal sophistication on Slashdot has grown immensely in recent months.
This story sounds very fishy. There are just too many oddities:
Come on...
Whether you consider nuclear power or coal burning safer depends on your values.
Try this experiment on your local anti-nuclear activist:
So are you really anti-nuclear to save human life or, more precisely, to save elite techie yuppie lives in exchange for the deaths of faceless mine workers?
"Let's use wind and solar and flower power!" is a bogus cop-out. For a couple decades, nuclear and coal are the main, available options. Pick one.
And give the Mine Safety and Health Administration a careful scrutiny before you go on and on about the dangers of nuclear power.
I'm amazed at how low these prices are. These fees are not supporting any corporations. That's chump change! The suit alone cost like $4 million. Is this really what they're fighting for?
Meteorological stations (the weather guages) in the 19th century were boxes stuck out on poles in the middle of a field. Meteorological stations in the 21st century are boxes stuck out on poles in the middle of an airport tarmac.
This is standard canard. The main component (70%) is measurements over the sea surface. Further, most warming has occurred since 1980-- long after the effect you cite should have appeared. Be careful; the petrochemical industry spends a lot of money spreading such "commonsense" nonsense.
Or what about the ozone hole? [...] And we have no theory today to explain why it subsequently shrunk.
Our lack of understanding is my point, but... this from the 1998 WMO/UNEP Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion: "The large ozone losses in the Southern Hemisphere polar region during spring continued unabated with approximately the same magnitude and areal extent as in the early 1990s. [...] These ozone changes are consistent overall with our understanding of chemistry and dynamics."
All I know for sure is that the Mount Pinatubo eruption last decade released more CO2 into the atmosphere in one week then the entire history of human industry.
Pure invention. Here are global CO2 levels as measured at the Muana Loa observatory. No discontinuity due to Pinatubo's 1992 eruption. (You're probably thinking of SO2, but you're still overstating.)
Human-caused CO2 increases are certain. Global warming is certain. The first should cause the second. But conceivably we're missing something, the CO2 increases are not causing global warming, and coincidentally some unknown, natural force is the real cause. It's possible. But odds of even, say, 1 in 10 that we're hosing the planet should perhaps give one pause.
These are all well below normal, and covers a good part of the US, I wonder what the rest of the world is reporting.
From NOAA:
Global surface temperatures were much above average in July [2000]. The combined land and ocean temperature anomaly was +0.33C above the 1880-1999 long-term mean. This was the 7th warmest July since 1880, 0.36C cooler than the record temperature recorded during the later stages of the 1997/1998 warm phase of ENSO (El Nino). July land surface temperatures were the 6th warmest on record (+0.49C above average).
what is happening due to plate movement and such is that more water is going in then coming out, so all this water is now building at the north pole
Plate movement rates are 2 to 12 centimeters per year. This is not causing a massive water buildup at the pole or altering currents on a human time scale.
Global warming is a certainty. Here is an excerpt from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's 1999 climate review:
The Global mean temperature for 1999 was the 5th warmest on record since 1880. The warmest and second warmest years were 1998 and 1997. The top 6 warmest years have been in the 1990's. Each year of this decade has been one of the top 15 warmest of the century.
Certainly, some climate changes happen naturally. However, it would be quite a coincidence if this rapid change had a natural cause at just the time that an obvious man-made cause appears: elevated atmospheric CO2 levels.
If there is one fact to know about the global environment, it is this: we have no clue. Water at the pole is not the first surprise. For decades, we poured out chemicals that appeared safe; they were non-flammable, non-corrosive, non-toxic, non-reactive-- what could be better? Well, in 1974 Molina and Rowland pointed out that these chemicals, CFCs, destroy stratospheric ozone, potentially allowing UV to devastate crops worldwide (not to mention causing skin cancer). Imagine the surprise: sometime totally inocuous like spray deoderant could devastate all life on earth. What a thought. It was like discovering that salsa causes tectonic instability. We had no clue. Since CFCs are stable enough to survive in the atmosphere for decades, estimates are that ozone levels will not return to normal until about 2050. That is, I will probably never live one day on this earth with a normal ozone layer.
But then everyone spent 10 years collecting data and running sophisticated computer models, and we got on top of the problem. Cool, right? Except that in 1985 the massive ozone hole over Antarctica was discovered. Totally unexpected. Didn't show in any computer model. No one had any idea why a hole should appear there instead of, say, over the continental US. After all that study, still we had no clue.
There is no reason to expect the global warming phenomena to be any more predictable than ozone depletion has been. In all likelihood, our CO2 emissions amount to a rampaging charge to fundamentally alter our entire planet. The eventual outcome? We have no clue.
No, that's only if ice on land melts (e.g. on Antarctica or Greenland). If ice at sea melts, the water level doesn't rise. Put an ice cube in a glass of water. When it melts, the water level stays the same.
The RIAA argument is that propping up the retail price is altruistic, since the wholesale price-- their take-- is fixed.
Bogus.
If retailers competed on price, they would immediately pressure for wholesale discounts to make a profit. How long would those "fixed wholesale prices" last if Wal-Mart said, "Label A: Give us $1/CD off and we'll give you more shelf space than Label B"?
Yes, actually. Here's ABC News commentator David Brinkley on Clinton's reelection:
The first strategy is to encrypt very significant values in memory at all times. [...] A communicative [?] function such as XOR is your friend here, as it alters values upon storing, restores them upon reading, and is extremely fast. The whole point is to make it very hard for the hacker to find the variables he is searching for in the first place. Values the hacker would know to look for are not left around so that a simple scan can find them.
Take two images, XOR them, and search for the change in the key variable instead. *Splat!*
Orrin Hatch is the man! (Pause. Tremble. Resume.) Let's make sure he knows that we like what he's doing:
Office of Senator Orrin Hatch
131 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
(202) 224-5251
senator_hatch@hatch.senate.gov