You've never seen anything cracked as fast as this thing will go down. With the Xbox, there was nothing but fun at stake, and you saw what happened. This DRM thing will be a holy war. Academics, spammers, hats of all colors will have a stake in seeing it die, and prestige if they're the one to do it. I'm worried, but I do not despair.
Hmm... Maybe they will figure out another way to improve their failing business model?
A few weeks ago, we held a forum on "Net Piracy" here at my school of Texas A&M. It wasn't really a forum, with the connotation of public discussion, but more of a presentation by the speakers. Attending were a local professor of communications, an author of a book on the subject, an MPAA vice president, and US Representative John Carter. They gave some very good speeches and then answered some presubmitted questions.
I was a pretty frustrated that I was not going to get a chance to ask a question. I had some very good ones! Then someone from the audience said something about originality, interrupting one of the speakers. The moderator asked him to clarify, and this guy in the audience launched into a diatribe about how formulaic are all the current movies and music, and how people would be more willing to pay money for it if it was more original.
Jesus Fucking Christ.
There were a lot of things that needed to be said at that forum. The US Representative was using "steal" and "pirate" as if they meant the same thing as "download" and "share." This guy is making our country's laws based on a powerful, industry-sponsored misconception. Why the hell would someone bring up this originality bullshit? That's something you complain about with your buddies. It's not something you use as justification for copyright violations before a member of the United States House of Representatives. Way to give us all a bad name, idiot.
This "failing business model" crap is just one more example of the same problem. You can sit around with your friends (or on Slashdot, if that is your only friend) and talk about how weak RIAA's and MPAA's business model is, but you don't use that as justification for breaking it.
I think the ideal would look a lot like iTunes, with all music, movies, and TV shows available for download at a low price. That would be great for everyone. The people who produce it get paid, the people who want it get it whenever they want. Guess what? That business model has a lot of potential to fail. People will download the stuff, crack its encryption, and share it. There's nothing wrong with the business model, it's the assholes you see all around you that don't follow the rules.
I resent the whining camera prop commercial they play before movies as much as the next guy, and Britney Spears spews nothing but bullshit, but seriously, they really do need to get paid. Actors get paid too much (by my standards), and music labels don't compensate musicians well, but they REALLY DO NEED TO GET PAID. There's no justification here for downloading music and movies you should be paying for. If you don't want to buy it, you don't get it. Life goes on.
Good points, but I should point out that there some kinds of wounds that aren't easily forgiven. Blind an enemy army with lasers, or sterilize them with radiation, and see how long those people resent you.
Great, so the movie industry has a big problem with leaks from insiders. Explain again how that takes the guilt away from people who share copies of said leaks?
No, just keep giving me plain CDs, for now, thanks.
Wow. Ok, look: the linked article didn't say anything about DRM. That was typical Slashdot-poster exaggeration. Where he got "Replace Your Music... Again" I have no idea. All the article talked about was a new write-once memory technology. Like CD's, but better. It says NOTHING about music.
There's no conspiracy here. It's write-once memory. It comes out, you copy your CD's to these PEDOT discs/cards/cubes/whatever, life is better. No more decaying CD's, no more scratches, no more skips when you hit a bump.
Jeez, people around here assume any new technology will only be used to enslave them in new, terrible ways. I used to think it was a site for technology ENTHUSIASTS. No. Pessimists.
Any company who's business relies on a shaky, ambiguous, morally (and quite probably legally) reprehensible law that a bunch of big business suits bought with some extra cash they had lying around isn't going to make it and doesn't deserve to.
It seems shortsighted to dismiss the service this company provides just because the camera can be hacked. Hackable==bad business model, end of story? The world isn't black and white like that.
Does anyone have a breakdown by component of how a laptop uses its memory? It would be interesting to see real numbers. Offhand I would guess that the display is the biggest consumer, followed by the hard drive and processor. All of these have very-low-energy versions being researched. I think we'll see large improvements in what can do with the energy, even if battery life sees no improvement at all.
No, and by that I mean zero, laptops need a DVD-R. Almost no laptops need any 3D accelerator. Why, on god's green earth, do cell phones need a camera? Why does a PDA need enough hardware to play videogames? Do you buy a cellphone for a camera? Did you go shopping for a portable video game system and say to yourself, "Hey this GBA is pretty cheap and has really good games, but I am looking for something that is 4 times as much and is hard as hell to play games on?"
True dat! If all need is to take notes, a 3D accelerator in your laptop is definitely overkill. So is the laptop; just use pen and paper instead, though it won't work as well. Better yet, save some trees and just try to remember everything, though it won't work as well.
Wait a second, I don't think I like your line of reasoning at all.
All those battery-wasting devices you mentioned are kinda handy and/or fun, so people like to use them. There's nothing wrong with wanting better batteries so we can use our gadgets longer. Basically, don't be so closed-minded.
You decide that batteries will continue to suck (and net a score:5 in the process!) by observing that nature abhors a vacuum?!? Fascinating! Somebody let all these engineers know they can quit trying, EvilTwinSkippy said it ain't gonna work.
While you're at it, call off all dams under contruction. Nature wants that water to flow, damn it! Better throw away those nukes, too, they'll probably explode like batteries. (Oh, we're already on it.) Tear down the skyscrapers, nature will just knock them over anyway, I'm sure. And cancel those interplanetary missions, nature said we're supposed to stay here and hunt deer.
the people making millions (billions?) selling fake cds are going to invest in the equipment to do it.
For real. I remember the story of a European satellite TV system getting hacked. I'm going from a very rough memory here, but as I recall, Israeli researchers used a scanning electron microscope to analyze the hard-coded encryption in the smart cards people used to access the service. Now, how the hell do you beat researchers with fricking scanning electron microscopes!?
...how well do those work under viaducts, in tunnels, in cities behind big buildings, in high mountains, in forests and mostly everywhere where large part of the sky is obscured.
It probably doesn't work well at all where there's no line-of-sight to the satellite. (Why would that include the tops of mountains?) Luckily, that's only about 0.004% of the landscape.*
There is a huge list of things they should be doing to save themselves a massive amount of work in the future. While they still have to GPS the critical areas right now, if they are too short-sighted they'll find themselves doing it for decades.
You aren't accounting for capitalism. Navtech makes its money selling maps, not ensuring that map data is available to everyone free of charge. Why should they go to all that trouble to train various government agencies to keep their respective data sets accurate and up-to-date? Some other company could come along, collect the (now, public domain) data, and sell its own update disc.
Even if there were no competition, I dispute that your solution would be easier. Where else in society is it easier to get the government to do something than to just do it yourself? The feedback system you mention, on the other hand, sounds like an excellent idea.
The truth is that, in the end, I'm always going to prefer the solution involving smaller government. Just my philosophical tendency.
Maybe you didn't read the article. You'd have seen that the "driving-around-with-a-GPS" approach isn't being used to generate maps of entirely new areas, it's used to revise maps where the roads have changed. It seems preferable to dealing with various government agencies with possibly inaccurate, out-of-date data in god-knows-what format. By doing it themselves, Navtech gets guaranteed-accurate, up-to-date data in a dependable timeframe. It's difficult and expensive, but they just pass the cost on to the consumer as $100+ update discs.
We could easily, permanently end the situation in Iraq. Sweep 500,000 troops through the country, shooting everyone they encounter. Or simply nuke it. We can't do these things for obvious political reasons.
POLITICAL REASONS? You would decline to end millions of innocent lives only because others would disapprove?!? Where are your fucking morals?
It's not a solid state motor. I dare say, there's no such thing. By definition, a motor turns, therefore it has moving parts. In fact, the word "motor" appears nowhere in the article, so I'm not sure where the submitter dreamt that up.
I dare say, the submitter is probably among the 99% of the population that doesn't haven't any inclination to learn the semantic subtleties of the words "pump" and "motor."
I don't know about the rest of you, but when I go to the fridge to grab a coke, I like to stand there and watch a quick sitcom on a 15" LCD display. Right...
Haha crazy bastards, putting a TV in a refrigerator. Idiots. I mean, what are you going to do, watch a cooking show on it, while you follow along? Look up recipes on the Internet?
I just get annoyed when I hear a computer attack referred to as an effective terrorist strategy. I certainly could survive if my computer didn't turn on today; no terror here, just kind of disappointment. Perhaps something like this could be called a "bummer. oh well" attack.
Maybe that's true for your computer and mine, but what about the computers that manage electrical grids, or air traffic control, or nuclear power plants? Don't be so naive.
I'm sure everyone has at least seen one article where they tell you to NEVER install software from a company you've either never heard of, or don't trust.
Who could possibly live by such a rule? I've got at least a hundred applications installed on my computer. They were written by almost as many companies and organizations, by thousands and thousands of developers. AND I DON'T PERSONALLY KNOW A SINGLE ONE OF THEM.
Here's a situation from my recent experience: say you want a utility to do some graphical traceroutes for a presentation. Can you find one written by a company you "trust"? Will it be nearly as good as the one on some guys homepage? The answers are maybe and no.
Go ahead and limit yourself, but you're really missing out.
And yet I am quite willing to guess that the majority of people found life satisfying.
By what means, exactly, do you know the deep feelings of those who lived 25,000 years ago? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying no one alive today has any idea.
People tend to think that the generations before them were wiser, happier, nobler, etc. It's just how we're wired.
Slashdot Mirror
You've never seen anything cracked as fast as this thing will go down. With the Xbox, there was nothing but fun at stake, and you saw what happened. This DRM thing will be a holy war. Academics, spammers, hats of all colors will have a stake in seeing it die, and prestige if they're the one to do it. I'm worried, but I do not despair.
Hmm... Maybe they will figure out another way to improve their failing business model?
A few weeks ago, we held a forum on "Net Piracy" here at my school of Texas A&M. It wasn't really a forum, with the connotation of public discussion, but more of a presentation by the speakers. Attending were a local professor of communications, an author of a book on the subject, an MPAA vice president, and US Representative John Carter. They gave some very good speeches and then answered some presubmitted questions.
I was a pretty frustrated that I was not going to get a chance to ask a question. I had some very good ones! Then someone from the audience said something about originality, interrupting one of the speakers. The moderator asked him to clarify, and this guy in the audience launched into a diatribe about how formulaic are all the current movies and music, and how people would be more willing to pay money for it if it was more original.
Jesus Fucking Christ.
There were a lot of things that needed to be said at that forum. The US Representative was using "steal" and "pirate" as if they meant the same thing as "download" and "share." This guy is making our country's laws based on a powerful, industry-sponsored misconception. Why the hell would someone bring up this originality bullshit? That's something you complain about with your buddies. It's not something you use as justification for copyright violations before a member of the United States House of Representatives. Way to give us all a bad name, idiot.
This "failing business model" crap is just one more example of the same problem. You can sit around with your friends (or on Slashdot, if that is your only friend) and talk about how weak RIAA's and MPAA's business model is, but you don't use that as justification for breaking it.
I think the ideal would look a lot like iTunes, with all music, movies, and TV shows available for download at a low price. That would be great for everyone. The people who produce it get paid, the people who want it get it whenever they want. Guess what? That business model has a lot of potential to fail. People will download the stuff, crack its encryption, and share it. There's nothing wrong with the business model, it's the assholes you see all around you that don't follow the rules.
I resent the whining camera prop commercial they play before movies as much as the next guy, and Britney Spears spews nothing but bullshit, but seriously, they really do need to get paid. Actors get paid too much (by my standards), and music labels don't compensate musicians well, but they REALLY DO NEED TO GET PAID. There's no justification here for downloading music and movies you should be paying for. If you don't want to buy it, you don't get it. Life goes on.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure he WAS trying to be funny.
Good points, but I should point out that there some kinds of wounds that aren't easily forgiven. Blind an enemy army with lasers, or sterilize them with radiation, and see how long those people resent you.
You and many others have forgotten one of the fundamentals in life: Never get in a fight with someone who has less to lose than you.
Ah, but you forgot another of life's fundamentals: there are no true generalizations (except this one).
And yet another: little truisms and adages don't mean shit in the real world.
Great, so the movie industry has a big problem with leaks from insiders. Explain again how that takes the guilt away from people who share copies of said leaks?
No, just keep giving me plain CDs, for now, thanks.
Wow. Ok, look: the linked article didn't say anything about DRM. That was typical Slashdot-poster exaggeration. Where he got "Replace Your Music... Again" I have no idea. All the article talked about was a new write-once memory technology. Like CD's, but better. It says NOTHING about music.
There's no conspiracy here. It's write-once memory. It comes out, you copy your CD's to these PEDOT discs/cards/cubes/whatever, life is better. No more decaying CD's, no more scratches, no more skips when you hit a bump.
Jeez, people around here assume any new technology will only be used to enslave them in new, terrible ways. I used to think it was a site for technology ENTHUSIASTS. No. Pessimists.
Any company who's business relies on a shaky, ambiguous, morally (and quite probably legally) reprehensible law that a bunch of big business suits bought with some extra cash they had lying around isn't going to make it and doesn't deserve to.
It seems shortsighted to dismiss the service this company provides just because the camera can be hacked. Hackable==bad business model, end of story? The world isn't black and white like that.
How does a "good whitehat" stop a DDoS? Seriously, I'd like to know.
Does anyone have a breakdown by component of how a laptop uses its memory? It would be interesting to see real numbers. Offhand I would guess that the display is the biggest consumer, followed by the hard drive and processor. All of these have very-low-energy versions being researched. I think we'll see large improvements in what can do with the energy, even if battery life sees no improvement at all.
No, and by that I mean zero, laptops need a DVD-R. Almost no laptops need any 3D accelerator. Why, on god's green earth, do cell phones need a camera? Why does a PDA need enough hardware to play videogames? Do you buy a cellphone for a camera? Did you go shopping for a portable video game system and say to yourself, "Hey this GBA is pretty cheap and has really good games, but I am looking for something that is 4 times as much and is hard as hell to play games on?"
True dat! If all need is to take notes, a 3D accelerator in your laptop is definitely overkill. So is the laptop; just use pen and paper instead, though it won't work as well. Better yet, save some trees and just try to remember everything, though it won't work as well.
Wait a second, I don't think I like your line of reasoning at all.
All those battery-wasting devices you mentioned are kinda handy and/or fun, so people like to use them. There's nothing wrong with wanting better batteries so we can use our gadgets longer. Basically, don't be so closed-minded.
You decide that batteries will continue to suck (and net a score:5 in the process!) by observing that nature abhors a vacuum?!? Fascinating! Somebody let all these engineers know they can quit trying, EvilTwinSkippy said it ain't gonna work.
While you're at it, call off all dams under contruction. Nature wants that water to flow, damn it! Better throw away those nukes, too, they'll probably explode like batteries. (Oh, we're already on it.) Tear down the skyscrapers, nature will just knock them over anyway, I'm sure. And cancel those interplanetary missions, nature said we're supposed to stay here and hunt deer.
the people making millions (billions?) selling fake cds are going to invest in the equipment to do it.
For real. I remember the story of a European satellite TV system getting hacked. I'm going from a very rough memory here, but as I recall, Israeli researchers used a scanning electron microscope to analyze the hard-coded encryption in the smart cards people used to access the service. Now, how the hell do you beat researchers with fricking scanning electron microscopes!?
...how well do those work under viaducts, in tunnels, in cities behind big buildings, in high mountains, in forests and mostly everywhere where large part of the sky is obscured.
It probably doesn't work well at all where there's no line-of-sight to the satellite. (Why would that include the tops of mountains?) Luckily, that's only about 0.004% of the landscape.*
(*) My estimate.
Ok, speaking of sidetalkin', am I the only guy fascinated by the one hot chick in the whole lineup? Guys?
There is a huge list of things they should be doing to save themselves a massive amount of work in the future. While they still have to GPS the critical areas right now, if they are too short-sighted they'll find themselves doing it for decades.
...and making money hand over fist all the while.
You aren't accounting for capitalism. Navtech makes its money selling maps, not ensuring that map data is available to everyone free of charge. Why should they go to all that trouble to train various government agencies to keep their respective data sets accurate and up-to-date? Some other company could come along, collect the (now, public domain) data, and sell its own update disc.
Even if there were no competition, I dispute that your solution would be easier. Where else in society is it easier to get the government to do something than to just do it yourself? The feedback system you mention, on the other hand, sounds like an excellent idea.
The truth is that, in the end, I'm always going to prefer the solution involving smaller government. Just my philosophical tendency.
Maybe you didn't read the article. You'd have seen that the "driving-around-with-a-GPS" approach isn't being used to generate maps of entirely new areas, it's used to revise maps where the roads have changed. It seems preferable to dealing with various government agencies with possibly inaccurate, out-of-date data in god-knows-what format. By doing it themselves, Navtech gets guaranteed-accurate, up-to-date data in a dependable timeframe. It's difficult and expensive, but they just pass the cost on to the consumer as $100+ update discs.
We could easily, permanently end the situation in Iraq. Sweep 500,000 troops through the country, shooting everyone they encounter. Or simply nuke it. We can't do these things for obvious political reasons.
POLITICAL REASONS? You would decline to end millions of innocent lives only because others would disapprove?!? Where are your fucking morals?
(Somebody already made the inevitable joke about Picard being stabbed by a Nausicaan, so don't bother.)
Wow, how much of a nerd do you have to be to pull that one off?
It's not a solid state motor. I dare say, there's no such thing. By definition, a motor turns, therefore it has moving parts. In fact, the word "motor" appears nowhere in the article, so I'm not sure where the submitter dreamt that up.
I dare say, the submitter is probably among the 99% of the population that doesn't haven't any inclination to learn the semantic subtleties of the words "pump" and "motor."
Prick.
I bet you wallpapered your house with tinfoil. Am I right?
I don't know about the rest of you, but when I go to the fridge to grab a coke, I like to stand there and watch a quick sitcom on a 15" LCD display. Right...
Haha crazy bastards, putting a TV in a refrigerator. Idiots. I mean, what are you going to do, watch a cooking show on it, while you follow along? Look up recipes on the Internet?
Hey, wait a minute...
I just get annoyed when I hear a computer attack referred to as an effective terrorist strategy. I certainly could survive if my computer didn't turn on today; no terror here, just kind of disappointment. Perhaps something like this could be called a "bummer. oh well" attack.
Maybe that's true for your computer and mine, but what about the computers that manage electrical grids, or air traffic control, or nuclear power plants? Don't be so naive.
I'm sure everyone has at least seen one article where they tell you to NEVER install software from a company you've either never heard of, or don't trust.
Who could possibly live by such a rule? I've got at least a hundred applications installed on my computer. They were written by almost as many companies and organizations, by thousands and thousands of developers. AND I DON'T PERSONALLY KNOW A SINGLE ONE OF THEM.
Here's a situation from my recent experience: say you want a utility to do some graphical traceroutes for a presentation. Can you find one written by a company you "trust"? Will it be nearly as good as the one on some guys homepage? The answers are maybe and no.
Go ahead and limit yourself, but you're really missing out.
And yet I am quite willing to guess that the majority of people found life satisfying.
By what means, exactly, do you know the deep feelings of those who lived 25,000 years ago? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying no one alive today has any idea.
People tend to think that the generations before them were wiser, happier, nobler, etc. It's just how we're wired.