It's like everything you consider doing really. It's not enough there there's some advantage to doing it. The advantage also has to outweight the drawbacks.
The advantage seems, to me, minute. Making it sligthly easier to track movements of certain kinds of materials ?
How ? Install 300 MILLION radiation-detectors, a centralised system for collecting the sensor-data. A sophisticated program for analysing the data and find "suspicious" activity among the millions of false alarms. Sending information on the whereabouts of every one of us regularily to a central government computer. Drain the batteries of devices where battery-life is a limiting factor already.
I don't know HOW much this would cost (nor does anyone else), but I think it goes without saying that we're talking huge sums, certainly billions, possibly tens of billions.
All this for making -one- kind of attack sligthly more likely to be thwarted ? Nukes spew primarily alpha and beta-radiation, it's not as if it's very hard to shield for either of those, a millimetre of any random metal will do it...
Braindead idea of the year. Luckily it's brainedead enough that there's zero chance it'll ever get off the ground.
It would be, if they taugth you that people aproaching you on the street to sell something are best avoided. They don't though. To the contrary, they ARE among these people who approach you on the street and try to sell you something.
Their actual teachings are worth nil for self-improvement. Parts of them could be worth something as reference-material for a comedy. Some of it is so silly that it's hard to know where to begin.
Yes, true, pay tends to be higher in jobs that not everyone is capable of doing. Because it requires skill, intelligence, significant education and/or training or a combination thereof. That isn't the same as saying that these jobs are -unpleasant- though.
Unless you consider it unpleasant to be doing something for which you are educated, unpleasant to use your intelligence.
And I beg to differ: Many people would find my line of work BORING, but so is most manual labour. I don't, actually, think that most people would prefer cleaning-work over work at a computer. Cleaning is boring to EVERYONE. Computer-work is boring to MANY. But cleaning-work is uncomfortable, messy, exhausting in addition. Oh yeah, and did I mention that most companies prefer having their offices cleaned when nobody is around ? Like 4-7am or 16-20pm or weekends ? That's not most peoples idea of a dreamjob.
I agree: Jobs are better paid when barriers to entry are high.
That wasn't the original claim though, the original claim was, the more unpleasant a job is, the higher it is paid. Which is nonsense. The most unpleasant jobs in the country are also among the poorest paid.
Actually, I think it's a good idea. There are lots of everyday items that I want a pretty steady supply of, and having 3 small kids besides our jobs mean me and my wife has better things to do than hang around in shops.
I'd love to have a lcd integrated in my fridge with the "standard" shopping-list stuff on it, and a simple method of hitting "send" and get the stuff delivered, twice a week would suffice.
Now, it'd be hard to get off the ground. You'd need a critical mass of buyers for efficient delivery, and I don't -have- a internet-connected lcd on my fridge (nor do most people)
But they deliver much -more- perishable stuff like Pizza, surely the logistics of delivering a basket containing the following 2-dozen articles sometime thursday between 17-20 are easier than the logistics of delivering that precise meal half an hour from now ?
If you -really- learned that lesson, it was easily worth the 30 bucks. More even.
You should notch it up a bit though:
Whenever -anyone- contacts -you- and want to sell you something (sometimes they don't call it "selling" but if it boils down to, you should send them money, selling it is!), you're better off saying "no".
If it's on the street, or on the phone, or in email, or otherwise makes little difference. Dealing with ANY of these people is a net detriment to you.
High pay is almost always high because of some factors that make the job less enjoyable.
Really ? I have found the complete oposite to be the case: the most -pleasant- jobs pay significantly more than the unpleasant jobs.
I've worked picking strawberries, driving a trash-car, moving furniture, doing cleaning, writing software in C, Python, and Coldfusion, teaching, crypto and application security.
Overall, the most pleasant jobs paid the best. Cleaning isn't anybodys idea of fun, and pays like shit. Looking for protocol-mistakes in a network-app is intellectually stimulating, means spending a lot of time perusing code and having discussions with very intelligent, overall interesting people, being in no physical discomfort whatsoever and being paid several times what the cleaner earns.
Pay is much more strongly correlated with the needed qualifications, and the value produced.
If it produces a lot of value for a company to have a certain job done, and very few people are capable of doing it, THEN it will be well-paid.
You should consider making atleast a small attempt at understanding that to which you are responding.
You can scream ALL you want. It won't change the fact.
Fact: If a person copied a copyrighted word without permission, and then was charged with theft -- he would walk free. He is simply not guilty of that crime, regardless of how many times you repeat the claim.
And infact, somebody in this thread DID refer to murder as theft. It was claimed that "taking something which you have no right to take" is theft.
By that definition; taking a LIFE which you have no right to take would be theft.
We have -different- laws for -different- crimes for a reason. NOTHING is equal between copying a protected work and stealing, so there's no benefit to attaching the same label to both:
When you STEAL something, ONE of the reasons it is wrong (not nessecarily the ONLY reason, but one of them) is that the original owner is deprived of the item. Does not apply to copying.
To prevent stealing, you can simply take good care of your object. Not applicable to copyrigthed works.
You can only STEAL something which belongs to someone else. You can however copy illegally even from a object that belongs to you. (for example a CD -- that single CD may belong to you even if the copyright to the songs stored on it do not)
There are sets of situations where you're allowed to steal, and situations where you'er allowed to copy. The two sets are almost completely disjoint. (there's no right to steal things which are older than a certain number of years, for example)
I don't object to copyright-violation being ILLEGAL.
I object to your silly insistence on using the same word on two completely different crimes with nothing in common.
Yeah sure. It costs less than ever before, and the price keeps falling like a lead-balloon. Same as other professions using technology, really.
Used to be, to do even simple professional photography you needed a well-equipped darkroom, today that is replaced by a computer and professional printer. The price isn't even close, nor is the training required to use it well comparable in the least.
The cameras too, have fallen radically in price in real terms. You get a very good DSLR camera and a basic assortment of good-quality lenses today for a single months salary.
Let's face it, as work-equipment goes, $3 grand is a pittance, you're going to need more expensive equipment than that to be a damn taxi-driver or for opening a burger-flipping-joint...
To be fair, I think most professional photographers will want more expensive equipment than that, but it's sufficient for starting out. If you can afford it, you'll probably WANT to spend $10 grand if you photograph mostly outdoors, and that PLUS the cost of a decent studio if you do studio-work.
Nevertheless, today, entry into the world og high-quality photography is cheaper than it ever was. Especially when you include consumables. What did a day in the field taking 500 photos cost if you where using professional equipment 10 years ago ? What does it cost today to take 1000 photos for no other reason than to practice your art ?
Learning the skills required is ALMOST as hard as it ever was. It is *sligthly* easier, particularily in a studio-setting because you can look at the result IMMEDIATELY, get critiques and try again. Used to be that that required a round-trip to the darkroom so feedback was a lot less immediate.
Certainly there are "internet rush-hours" the same way there are a lot more traffic on roads at 4pm on a friday afternoon than at 5am on a sunday morning.
But even in rush-hour (internet or road) usage isnt anywhere close to everyone going full-throttle downloading.
Yes, SOME people leave Bit-torrent slurping all it can 24x7. But other people dont.
Im not talking theory here, I work for an ISP. I cant be TOO spesific as that is considered confidential, but really, the PEAK traffic we see is something like 10% of the traffic we WOULD have seen if ALL our subscribers downloaded at max-rate simultaneously.
Mornings web-and-email checking aint the peak by the way, that causes just bursts of small pageloads. Our highest traffic is typically friday and saturday evening, like 7-11pm.
Youre probably right that traffic will over time get somewhat less bursty, stuff like netradio and such tend to produce a even stream all trough the day.
Maybe. We'll see. People receive a lot of music over the Internet, and in practice seems to be happy with 192Kbps mp3s. These are still noticeably poorer than CD-quality (around 256Kbps there's no hearable difference for most people), but people don't seem to care, they're "good enough".
Similarily, online movies can have pretty darn good quality if encoded at aproximately 1GB/hour, which works out to 2Mbps. Okay, this is not HDTV, but so far the advantages of say Blu-ray HDTV quality over plain old DVD-movies haven't convinced all that many. I'm guessing DVDs still outsell Blu-ray movies 20 to 1.
And notice that even 10 Mbps is *5* times what you need for a good quality streamed movie in dvd-resolution.
In short, I think you're right: Eventually we'll need more than 10Mbps for streaming TV, many households have more than one TV too afterall. But the key word is *eventually* -- nobody needs that today. Even -if- streaming TV was widely available, the large majority of programming is still not HDTV, so 10Mbps would be sufficient.
I'm not in the least surprised if 5 years from now I still see no reason to upgrade from 10Mbps.
But even if you're right, and even if the transition happens quicker than I think, like I said, 50Mbps is available from my ISP *today* and their infrastructure can deliver 250Mbps to the end-user *today*. The only reason they don't is there's no demand for it. People are happy with their 10Mbps, and aren't willing to pay even a few bucks more to have 25.
I consider it likely that the end-user infrastructure here is sufficient for atleast the next decade or two. 250Mbps is a LOT of data, even a Blu-Ray disk holds like 50GB of data for a 2-hour movie, which works out to 50Mbps, but that is assuming no better compression is used, which is unrealistic. People are swapping 1-2GB recompressed DVD-movies a lot more than 8GB originals, because to most people the quality of the 2GB movie is perfectly acceptable.
The trunk will need expansion though, the biggest difference may be that while downloading is something people do now and then, watching television is something many families does for 5 or more hours daily. (atleast the TV is on, even if nobodys watching it, not that I understand that behaviour, but I do oberve it as fairly common)
Dunno. I know broadband tends to suck in the US, but over here availability is currently vastly outstripping demand.
My ISP offers three capacities. 10Mbps, 25Mbps or 50Mbps. All of these are symetrical. (same upload and download)
I, and apparently 95% of their customers go for the lowest speed: 10Mbps. The price-premium for 25 or 50 is very moderate, but there's simply nothing I use the internet for that would benefit substantially from an upgrade from 10Mbps to 25Mbps.
I'm sure with time that'll change. High-bandwith services will appear, and people will upgrade. That's fine though, the infrastructure supports 250Mbps to a single subscriber -TODAY- It's just the my ISP isn't currently offering it, for the fairly simple reason that hardly anyone even buys 50Mbps today, so the market for 250Mbps is simply nonexisting. (or very VERY close to that)
So, the only reason most of the people in my neighbourhood has "only" 10Mbps is that they don't care to pay another $10/month or something like that for 25Mbps.
And before you ask; yes you typically get these speeds, or close to that, to international servers too.
People buy bandwith used on PEAK usage, not AVERAGE usage. Yes, occasionally many people PEAK their usage simultaneously and things slow down. So what ? That's true of every other infrastructure in the world too.
The roads don't have capacity to handle 100% of all cars in the area being driven continously around the clock. Which people also don't do so it works out ok. At some times many people use their cars simultaneously, and the roads slow down (aka congest). Somehow society deals with it and fails to collapse.
To have capacity for everyone 100% simultaneously means in practice building all trunk-lines with 20 times the average usage and probably 5 times peak usage, which is just plainly a waste of cash. If you do that, you'll be much more expensive than competing ISPs and they will eat your lunch.
You can -monitor- your lines and upgrade them when it's needed though. It's not a difficult concept.
I'd support mandatory logging of traffic-levels on trunk-lines and publishing of same though, so that customers can make a rational choice and will KNOW that ISPx is sligthly cheaper but that ISPy has more capacity in their lines. As it is, this information spreads very slowly and inefficiently.
Nothing stops you from visiting speedtest.net before choosing an ISP though...
In some areas there's sucky or no real competition. But that's a completely separate problem.
Theft is taking something which is the property of someone else. Creating a new artifact from an existing one (one that you own at that) and then giving that artifact away does not fit the definition at all. It's not a nitpick, there really is nothing in common at all between the two situations.
I also didn't say that theft OR copyright-violation is right or defendable. (I also didn't say the oposite, that question didn't enter the discussion at all)
By the way, lying is saying something you KNOW aren't true. If you say something which you believe to be true, but which turns out not to be it's called a/mistake/ not a/lie/. The two ALSO aren't the same. And people don't react the same to them. Most people find it much more acceptable (human even!) to be mistaken once in a while. Lying on the other hand is intentional deceipt and something different alltogether. (there's surely situations where that too is defensible, but the two aren't the same)
By the way, murder also is not theft -- despite you insisting to the contrary. (taking a life which you have no right to take would be "theft" by your pecualiar and strange usage of the word "theft")
What the browser sends to the server IS the effective password.
If the user types 'secrit' and the browser sends hash('secrit'+'salt') to the server, then that hash effectively -is- the password.
What will happen when the user logs in later ? What will the browser need to send to the server ? The same hash, right ? If so, you don't actually need to know what 'secrit' is, you only need to know the resulting hash and send that over....
And even if you repeat the lie a million times, copyright-violation is still copyright-violation and not theft. They are both illegal, but they are completely DIFFERENT illegal activities.
Just because speeding and murder are both illegal activities, it does not make sense to refer to people who break the speed-limit as "murderers".
First, the "bouncer" is not a big muscular independent being. No he is a program for which you have TOTAL control of his environment. He only gets oxygen when and if you say he does. His heart only beats when and if you say it should, you can pause his EVERY action at will, you can inspect his EVERY thought at will.
Under those circumstances, odds are you'll be able to get hold of the key, don't you think ?
Furthermore, there's one more serious flaw: You don't *NEED* to.
The thing is, there are thousands (if the company selling content is successful; MILLIONS) of other little boxes protected by other bouncers holding the same secret sheet music.
If even *one* person in the world manages to wrestle the key from his bouncer, the sheet-music (or the key, or both) is freely downloadable by everyone a few hours later.
The bouncer may (despite the flaws I mention above) deter most of the people most of the time. He will however not be able to deter EVERYONE ALL OF THE TIME, which is his task. Let *one* guy trough, and the secret is permanently liberated. That's an impossible task, even if the bouncer *wasn't* dependant on you choosing to supply him oxygen.
So, how do you set up a "controlled business environment" so that taking a photo of your computerscreen in your office "sends a clear signal" ? Yeah, I know, don't have offices.
But then the employee may be working late, or come early. Oh ! I know ! Forbid -any- employee from -ever- being in a room alone.
Yes it's possible. But the kind of "controlled" environment that's needed doesn't exist with the huge majority of businesses. For most businesses, you simply have to have a base level of trust in your employees. Adding the kind of restrictions needed to seriously hamper copying of internal data will cause huge productivity-losses. Which means it's only worth it when the data is REALLY valuable or REALLY dangerous or both.
Offcourse they don't, but one huge trunk tends to be several orders of magnitude cheaper than the thousands of thin end-subscriber-lines that feeds into it.
What do you figure cost more, wiring up 50.000 dwellings in the municipality of Stavanger with 1mbps or more to a central point, or linking Stavanger to Bergen (next larger city, 150km away) with a single high-capacity fibre-line sufficient to deal with it all?
Keep in mind that the needed capacity will NOT be 50.000 * 1mbps, (50Gbps) not even close, that would only be the case if 100% of all subscribers where using their lines 100% the ENTIRE time, which completely fails to be the case.
In practice a 10Gbps link would do it just splendidly, which is still orders of magnitude within the capacity of a -single- fibre. (yes you'd want to have atleast 2, preferably 3 fibres out of town for redundancy)
The problem is -- with DRM the intended recipient and the potential attacker is THE SAME PERSON. Which is mathemathically impossible to solve using crypto.
Crypto works because you give the decryption-key to the intended recipient, but others don't know it, and can't easily guess it since it's a large random string.
But with DRM, you give the recipient the file *AND* the decryption-key, and then say: You may use this key to decrypt the file and display it on your screen; but not to decrypt it and print it on your printer ! (for example)
That is fundamentally impossible to enforce. The decryption-algorithm does not care what happens to the file AFTERWARDS.
It's -not- reasonable. Just because he made one mistake, doesn't mean he didn't make more.
He is assuming that -every- minute saved will be billable at $100/hour, which just isn't realistic. If an average employee really was billable 100% of the time, then the company would be making $100*2000 or so, $200.000 in billable time from a single employee, given that this is like 3 times the salary, they'd be making gargantuan profits.
No, more reasonable is to calculate the cost of wasting time as the employees *SALARY* for the wasted time. If the average employee among those 10K (not all of them will be high earners, that will include receptionists, secretaries, and other entry-level staff!) make $70K/year, this works out to aproximately $35/hour.
Which is something like 1/3rd of the stated sum.
Furthermore, it assumes that the -entire- time needed for patching the OS will be completely lost. This is rarely the case. At my work the machines are updated once a month regularily, (sometimes extra if something "important" comes up), let's say 15 times a year on average. When you hit "shutdown" for the first time in a new month, the machine will suggest installing updates and THEN shutting down, total time lost to this is essentially nil. Atleast -certainly- not the 5 hours or so that would be required for the braindead scheme of his to actually turn a profit.
Even -if- you insist on doing patching nightly; what is wrong with using wake-on-lan to wake the machines at 2am, let them patch and turn back off at 2:15am ?
Keeping everything powered on for 14 hours, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year, because a few times a month you need a few minutes of patches is monumentally wasteful.
They deal with the -risk- of it, yes. But they also try to shut it down whenever they become aware of it. In some competitions they even go as far as storing blood-samples of participating athletes so that if one year from now a new method of doping, and a test for it, becomes available, they can retroactively re-test the old samples and withdraw and medals cheaters may have gotten.
So I don't see any reason they shouldn't forbid performance-enhancing prostethics when they are aware of those.
Sure. 100 people leaving 0.15Kw computers on overnight (let's call that 14 hours (1800 - 0800) will spend 210Kwh/night. If you've got AC running you can basically double that as you need to pay extra to get rid of the excess heat.
That has a value of something like $30/night, so if you gave out monthly prices to the best saver, and this caused most people to try saving, you would have a price-pot in the area of $1000/month. Double that if you have AC running.
14 hours a day times 52 times 5 times average power-consumption for an idling desktop times 10K employees works out to:
14*52*5*0.15*10000 = 5.460.000 Kwh of electric power, WORSE in the time when you use AC, because you'll need additional AC to get rid of that extra heat.
With average power-prices of 10 cent, you'll spend more than half a million dollar just paying for the electricity, in practice with AC and all you'll probably pay a million.
So, you saved $80K and wasted a million. Way to go !
Yeah, not everyone needs battery-life. My laptop at work had a -dead- battery for probably a month before I even discovered. I could live perfectly well with a laptop with -zero- battery.
I -do- take it with me: To customers to demonstrate something, back home if I'm planning to work from home for a day or two, to the meeting-room to give a presentation.
But it's always plugged in, except when I visit customers, which is why I discovered the dead battery at all. Luckily I discovered it before going, because I checked if the battery was fully charged, only to discover, infact it was stone-dead, the laptop would not even boot from it.
I'm guessing there's a -LOT- of laptops that see extremely seldom any battery-use at all.
Has to do with battery lifetime though. I need a fairly powerful laptop, which means sucky battery-life. If a laptop had 10-20 hour battery-life, I could work from home for a day or two without a power-adapter. But since I'm going to need extra juice anyway, I might as well keep the thing plugged in. (less of a hassle than swapping and charging batteries every 2-3 hours for sure)
Sorry. Your confidence in the academic indexes is too high.
True; they will contain everything that is -ALREADY- recognized as being important. But that doesn't help you much; that just tells you the stuff that the scientific community already agrees is important.
Much more interesting is the stuff that -IS- important, but which isn't recognized as such yet. That can be so for a multitude of reasons ranging from plain misunderstanding and to the work not yet being read by anyone with enough expertise to recognize the importance. Notice: *before* the importance is recognized, the experts have no reason to read the work, much less if reading it would require getting it translated first.
You'll get *most* of the important stuff *most* of the time.
But that's a VERY different statement from: Being *CERTAIN* that you've got *EVERYTHING* important.
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It's like everything you consider doing really. It's not enough there there's some advantage to doing it. The advantage also has to outweight the drawbacks.
The advantage seems, to me, minute. Making it sligthly easier to track movements of certain kinds of materials ?
How ? Install 300 MILLION radiation-detectors, a centralised system for collecting the sensor-data. A sophisticated program for analysing the data and find "suspicious" activity among the millions of false alarms. Sending information on the whereabouts of every one of us regularily to a central government computer. Drain the batteries of devices where battery-life is a limiting factor already.
I don't know HOW much this would cost (nor does anyone else), but I think it goes without saying that we're talking huge sums, certainly billions, possibly tens of billions.
All this for making -one- kind of attack sligthly more likely to be thwarted ? Nukes spew primarily alpha and beta-radiation, it's not as if it's very hard to shield for either of those, a millimetre of any random metal will do it...
Braindead idea of the year. Luckily it's brainedead enough that there's zero chance it'll ever get off the ground.
It would be, if they taugth you that people aproaching you on the street to sell something are best avoided. They don't though. To the contrary, they ARE among these people who approach you on the street and try to sell you something.
Their actual teachings are worth nil for self-improvement. Parts of them could be worth something as reference-material for a comedy. Some of it is so silly that it's hard to know where to begin.
You babble. But you're still wrong.
Yes, true, pay tends to be higher in jobs that not everyone is capable of doing. Because it requires skill, intelligence, significant education and/or training or a combination thereof. That isn't the same as saying that these jobs are -unpleasant- though.
Unless you consider it unpleasant to be doing something for which you are educated, unpleasant to use your intelligence.
And I beg to differ: Many people would find my line of work BORING, but so is most manual labour. I don't, actually, think that most people would prefer cleaning-work over work at a computer. Cleaning is boring to EVERYONE. Computer-work is boring to MANY. But cleaning-work is uncomfortable, messy, exhausting in addition. Oh yeah, and did I mention that most companies prefer having their offices cleaned when nobody is around ? Like 4-7am or 16-20pm or weekends ? That's not most peoples idea of a dreamjob.
I agree: Jobs are better paid when barriers to entry are high.
That wasn't the original claim though, the original claim was, the more unpleasant a job is, the higher it is paid. Which is nonsense. The most unpleasant jobs in the country are also among the poorest paid.
Actually, I think it's a good idea. There are lots of everyday items that I want a pretty steady supply of, and having 3 small kids besides our jobs mean me and my wife has better things to do than hang around in shops.
I'd love to have a lcd integrated in my fridge with the "standard" shopping-list stuff on it, and a simple method of hitting "send" and get the stuff delivered, twice a week would suffice.
Now, it'd be hard to get off the ground. You'd need a critical mass of buyers for efficient delivery, and I don't -have- a internet-connected lcd on my fridge (nor do most people)
But they deliver much -more- perishable stuff like Pizza, surely the logistics of delivering a basket containing the following 2-dozen articles sometime thursday between 17-20 are easier than the logistics of delivering that precise meal half an hour from now ?
If you -really- learned that lesson, it was easily worth the 30 bucks. More even.
You should notch it up a bit though:
Whenever -anyone- contacts -you- and want to sell you something (sometimes they don't call it "selling" but if it boils down to, you should send them money, selling it is!), you're better off saying "no".
If it's on the street, or on the phone, or in email, or otherwise makes little difference. Dealing with ANY of these people is a net detriment to you.
High pay is almost always high because of some factors that make the job less enjoyable.
Really ? I have found the complete oposite to be the case: the most -pleasant- jobs pay significantly more than the unpleasant jobs.
I've worked picking strawberries, driving a trash-car, moving furniture, doing cleaning, writing software in C, Python, and Coldfusion, teaching, crypto and application security.
Overall, the most pleasant jobs paid the best. Cleaning isn't anybodys idea of fun, and pays like shit. Looking for protocol-mistakes in a network-app is intellectually stimulating, means spending a lot of time perusing code and having discussions with very intelligent, overall interesting people, being in no physical discomfort whatsoever and being paid several times what the cleaner earns.
Pay is much more strongly correlated with the needed qualifications, and the value produced.
If it produces a lot of value for a company to have a certain job done, and very few people are capable of doing it, THEN it will be well-paid.
You should consider making atleast a small attempt at understanding that to which you are responding.
You can scream ALL you want. It won't change the fact.
Fact: If a person copied a copyrighted word without permission, and then was charged with theft -- he would walk free. He is simply not guilty of that crime, regardless of how many times you repeat the claim.
And infact, somebody in this thread DID refer to murder as theft. It was claimed that "taking something which you have no right to take" is theft.
By that definition; taking a LIFE which you have no right to take would be theft.
We have -different- laws for -different- crimes for a reason. NOTHING is equal between copying a protected work and stealing, so there's no benefit to attaching the same label to both:
When you STEAL something, ONE of the reasons it is wrong (not nessecarily the ONLY reason, but one of them) is that the original owner is deprived of the item. Does not apply to copying.
To prevent stealing, you can simply take good care of your object. Not applicable to copyrigthed works.
You can only STEAL something which belongs to someone else. You can however copy illegally even from a object that belongs to you. (for example a CD -- that single CD may belong to you even if the copyright to the songs stored on it do not)
There are sets of situations where you're allowed to steal, and situations where you'er allowed to copy. The two sets are almost completely disjoint. (there's no right to steal things which are older than a certain number of years, for example)
I don't object to copyright-violation being ILLEGAL.
I object to your silly insistence on using the same word on two completely different crimes with nothing in common.
Yeah sure. It costs less than ever before, and the price keeps falling like a lead-balloon. Same as other professions using technology, really.
Used to be, to do even simple professional photography you needed a well-equipped darkroom, today that is replaced by a computer and professional printer. The price isn't even close, nor is the training required to use it well comparable in the least.
The cameras too, have fallen radically in price in real terms. You get a very good DSLR camera and a basic assortment of good-quality lenses today for a single months salary.
Let's face it, as work-equipment goes, $3 grand is a pittance, you're going to need more expensive equipment than that to be a damn taxi-driver or for opening a burger-flipping-joint...
To be fair, I think most professional photographers will want more expensive equipment than that, but it's sufficient for starting out. If you can afford it, you'll probably WANT to spend $10 grand if you photograph mostly outdoors, and that PLUS the cost of a decent studio if you do studio-work.
Nevertheless, today, entry into the world og high-quality photography is cheaper than it ever was. Especially when you include consumables. What did a day in the field taking 500 photos cost if you where using professional equipment 10 years ago ? What does it cost today to take 1000 photos for no other reason than to practice your art ?
Learning the skills required is ALMOST as hard as it ever was. It is *sligthly* easier, particularily in a studio-setting because you can look at the result IMMEDIATELY, get critiques and try again. Used to be that that required a round-trip to the darkroom so feedback was a lot less immediate.
Certainly there are "internet rush-hours" the same way there are a lot more traffic on roads at 4pm on a friday afternoon than at 5am on a sunday morning.
But even in rush-hour (internet or road) usage isnt anywhere close to everyone going full-throttle downloading.
Yes, SOME people leave Bit-torrent slurping all it can 24x7. But other people dont.
Im not talking theory here, I work for an ISP. I cant be TOO spesific as that is considered confidential, but really, the PEAK traffic we see is something like 10% of the traffic we WOULD have seen if ALL our subscribers downloaded at max-rate simultaneously.
Mornings web-and-email checking aint the peak by the way, that causes just bursts of small pageloads. Our highest traffic is typically friday and saturday evening, like 7-11pm.
Youre probably right that traffic will over time get somewhat less bursty, stuff like netradio and such tend to produce a even stream all trough the day.
Maybe. We'll see. People receive a lot of music over the Internet, and in practice seems to be happy with 192Kbps mp3s. These are still noticeably poorer than CD-quality (around 256Kbps there's no hearable difference for most people), but people don't seem to care, they're "good enough".
Similarily, online movies can have pretty darn good quality if encoded at aproximately 1GB/hour, which works out to 2Mbps. Okay, this is not HDTV, but so far the advantages of say Blu-ray HDTV quality over plain old DVD-movies haven't convinced all that many. I'm guessing DVDs still outsell Blu-ray movies 20 to 1.
And notice that even 10 Mbps is *5* times what you need for a good quality streamed movie in dvd-resolution.
In short, I think you're right: Eventually we'll need more than 10Mbps for streaming TV, many households have more than one TV too afterall. But the key word is *eventually* -- nobody needs that today. Even -if- streaming TV was widely available, the large majority of programming is still not HDTV, so 10Mbps would be sufficient.
I'm not in the least surprised if 5 years from now I still see no reason to upgrade from 10Mbps.
But even if you're right, and even if the transition happens quicker than I think, like I said, 50Mbps is available from my ISP *today* and their infrastructure can deliver 250Mbps to the end-user *today*. The only reason they don't is there's no demand for it. People are happy with their 10Mbps, and aren't willing to pay even a few bucks more to have 25.
I consider it likely that the end-user infrastructure here is sufficient for atleast the next decade or two. 250Mbps is a LOT of data, even a Blu-Ray disk holds like 50GB of data for a 2-hour movie, which works out to 50Mbps, but that is assuming no better compression is used, which is unrealistic. People are swapping 1-2GB recompressed DVD-movies a lot more than 8GB originals, because to most people the quality of the 2GB movie is perfectly acceptable.
The trunk will need expansion though, the biggest difference may be that while downloading is something people do now and then, watching television is something many families does for 5 or more hours daily. (atleast the TV is on, even if nobodys watching it, not that I understand that behaviour, but I do oberve it as fairly common)
Dunno. I know broadband tends to suck in the US, but over here availability is currently vastly outstripping demand.
My ISP offers three capacities. 10Mbps, 25Mbps or 50Mbps. All of these are symetrical. (same upload and download)
I, and apparently 95% of their customers go for the lowest speed: 10Mbps. The price-premium for 25 or 50 is very moderate, but there's simply nothing I use the internet for that would benefit substantially from an upgrade from 10Mbps to 25Mbps.
I'm sure with time that'll change. High-bandwith services will appear, and people will upgrade. That's fine though, the infrastructure supports 250Mbps to a single subscriber -TODAY- It's just the my ISP isn't currently offering it, for the fairly simple reason that hardly anyone even buys 50Mbps today, so the market for 250Mbps is simply nonexisting. (or very VERY close to that)
So, the only reason most of the people in my neighbourhood has "only" 10Mbps is that they don't care to pay another $10/month or something like that for 25Mbps.
And before you ask; yes you typically get these speeds, or close to that, to international servers too.
No. You're wrong. It really is that simple.
People buy bandwith used on PEAK usage, not AVERAGE usage. Yes, occasionally many people PEAK their usage simultaneously and things slow down. So what ? That's true of every other infrastructure in the world too.
The roads don't have capacity to handle 100% of all cars in the area being driven continously around the clock. Which people also don't do so it works out ok. At some times many people use their cars simultaneously, and the roads slow down (aka congest). Somehow society deals with it and fails to collapse.
To have capacity for everyone 100% simultaneously means in practice building all trunk-lines with 20 times the average usage and probably 5 times peak usage, which is just plainly a waste of cash. If you do that, you'll be much more expensive than competing ISPs and they will eat your lunch.
You can -monitor- your lines and upgrade them when it's needed though. It's not a difficult concept.
I'd support mandatory logging of traffic-levels on trunk-lines and publishing of same though, so that customers can make a rational choice and will KNOW that ISPx is sligthly cheaper but that ISPy has more capacity in their lines. As it is, this information spreads very slowly and inefficiently.
Nothing stops you from visiting speedtest.net before choosing an ISP though...
In some areas there's sucky or no real competition. But that's a completely separate problem.
Theft is taking something which is the property of someone else. Creating a new artifact from an existing one (one that you own at that) and then giving that artifact away does not fit the definition at all. It's not a nitpick, there really is nothing in common at all between the two situations.
/mistake/ not a /lie/. The two ALSO aren't the same. And people don't react the same to them. Most people find it much more acceptable (human even!) to be mistaken once in a while. Lying on the other hand is intentional deceipt and something different alltogether. (there's surely situations where that too is defensible, but the two aren't the same)
I also didn't say that theft OR copyright-violation is right or defendable. (I also didn't say the oposite, that question didn't enter the discussion at all)
By the way, lying is saying something you KNOW aren't true. If you say something which you believe to be true, but which turns out not to be it's called a
By the way, murder also is not theft -- despite you insisting to the contrary. (taking a life which you have no right to take would be "theft" by your pecualiar and strange usage of the word "theft")
That would not work.
What the browser sends to the server IS the effective password.
If the user types 'secrit' and the browser sends hash('secrit'+'salt') to the server, then that hash effectively -is- the password.
What will happen when the user logs in later ? What will the browser need to send to the server ? The same hash, right ? If so, you don't actually need to know what 'secrit' is, you only need to know the resulting hash and send that over....
And even if you repeat the lie a million times, copyright-violation is still copyright-violation and not theft. They are both illegal, but they are completely DIFFERENT illegal activities.
Just because speeding and murder are both illegal activities, it does not make sense to refer to people who break the speed-limit as "murderers".
Your analogy is severly flawed.
First, the "bouncer" is not a big muscular independent being. No he is a program for which you have TOTAL control of his environment. He only gets oxygen when and if you say he does. His heart only beats when and if you say it should, you can pause his EVERY action at will, you can inspect his EVERY thought at will.
Under those circumstances, odds are you'll be able to get hold of the key, don't you think ?
Furthermore, there's one more serious flaw: You don't *NEED* to.
The thing is, there are thousands (if the company selling content is successful; MILLIONS) of other little boxes protected by other bouncers holding the same secret sheet music.
If even *one* person in the world manages to wrestle the key from his bouncer, the sheet-music (or the key, or both) is freely downloadable by everyone a few hours later.
The bouncer may (despite the flaws I mention above) deter most of the people most of the time. He will however not be able to deter EVERYONE ALL OF THE TIME, which is his task. Let *one* guy trough, and the secret is permanently liberated. That's an impossible task, even if the bouncer *wasn't* dependant on you choosing to supply him oxygen.
So, how do you set up a "controlled business environment" so that taking a photo of your computerscreen in your office "sends a clear signal" ? Yeah, I know, don't have offices.
But then the employee may be working late, or come early. Oh ! I know ! Forbid -any- employee from -ever- being in a room alone.
Yes it's possible. But the kind of "controlled" environment that's needed doesn't exist with the huge majority of businesses. For most businesses, you simply have to have a base level of trust in your employees. Adding the kind of restrictions needed to seriously hamper copying of internal data will cause huge productivity-losses. Which means it's only worth it when the data is REALLY valuable or REALLY dangerous or both.
Offcourse they don't, but one huge trunk tends to be several orders of magnitude cheaper than the thousands of thin end-subscriber-lines that feeds into it.
What do you figure cost more, wiring up 50.000 dwellings in the municipality of Stavanger with 1mbps or more to a central point, or linking Stavanger to Bergen (next larger city, 150km away) with a single high-capacity fibre-line sufficient to deal with it all?
Keep in mind that the needed capacity will NOT be 50.000 * 1mbps, (50Gbps) not even close, that would only be the case if 100% of all subscribers where using their lines 100% the ENTIRE time, which completely fails to be the case.
In practice a 10Gbps link would do it just splendidly, which is still orders of magnitude within the capacity of a -single- fibre. (yes you'd want to have atleast 2, preferably 3 fibres out of town for redundancy)
The problem is -- with DRM the intended recipient and the potential attacker is THE SAME PERSON. Which is mathemathically impossible to solve using crypto.
Crypto works because you give the decryption-key to the intended recipient, but others don't know it, and can't easily guess it since it's a large random string.
But with DRM, you give the recipient the file *AND* the decryption-key, and then say: You may use this key to decrypt the file and display it on your screen; but not to decrypt it and print it on your printer ! (for example)
That is fundamentally impossible to enforce. The decryption-algorithm does not care what happens to the file AFTERWARDS.
It's -not- reasonable. Just because he made one mistake, doesn't mean he didn't make more.
He is assuming that -every- minute saved will be billable at $100/hour, which just isn't realistic. If an average employee really was billable 100% of the time, then the company would be making $100*2000 or so, $200.000 in billable time from a single employee, given that this is like 3 times the salary, they'd be making gargantuan profits.
No, more reasonable is to calculate the cost of wasting time as the employees *SALARY* for the wasted time. If the average employee among those 10K (not all of them will be high earners, that will include receptionists, secretaries, and other entry-level staff!) make $70K/year, this works out to aproximately $35/hour.
Which is something like 1/3rd of the stated sum.
Furthermore, it assumes that the -entire- time needed for patching the OS will be completely lost. This is rarely the case. At my work the machines are updated once a month regularily, (sometimes extra if something "important" comes up), let's say 15 times a year on average. When you hit "shutdown" for the first time in a new month, the machine will suggest installing updates and THEN shutting down, total time lost to this is essentially nil. Atleast -certainly- not the 5 hours or so that would be required for the braindead scheme of his to actually turn a profit.
Even -if- you insist on doing patching nightly; what is wrong with using wake-on-lan to wake the machines at 2am, let them patch and turn back off at 2:15am ?
Keeping everything powered on for 14 hours, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year, because a few times a month you need a few minutes of patches is monumentally wasteful.
They deal with the -risk- of it, yes. But they also try to shut it down whenever they become aware of it. In some competitions they even go as far as storing blood-samples of participating athletes so that if one year from now a new method of doping, and a test for it, becomes available, they can retroactively re-test the old samples and withdraw and medals cheaters may have gotten.
So I don't see any reason they shouldn't forbid performance-enhancing prostethics when they are aware of those.
Sure. 100 people leaving 0.15Kw computers on overnight (let's call that 14 hours (1800 - 0800) will spend 210Kwh/night. If you've got AC running you can basically double that as you need to pay extra to get rid of the excess heat.
That has a value of something like $30/night, so if you gave out monthly prices to the best saver, and this caused most people to try saving, you would have a price-pot in the area of $1000/month. Double that if you have AC running.
14 hours a day times 52 times 5 times average power-consumption for an idling desktop times 10K employees works out to:
14*52*5*0.15*10000 = 5.460.000 Kwh of electric power, WORSE in the time when you use AC, because you'll need additional AC to get rid of that extra heat.
With average power-prices of 10 cent, you'll spend more than half a million dollar just paying for the electricity, in practice with AC and all you'll probably pay a million.
So, you saved $80K and wasted a million. Way to go !
Yeah, not everyone needs battery-life. My laptop at work had a -dead- battery for probably a month before I even discovered. I could live perfectly well with a laptop with -zero- battery.
I -do- take it with me: To customers to demonstrate something, back home if I'm planning to work from home for a day or two, to the meeting-room to give a presentation.
But it's always plugged in, except when I visit customers, which is why I discovered the dead battery at all. Luckily I discovered it before going, because I checked if the battery was fully charged, only to discover, infact it was stone-dead, the laptop would not even boot from it.
I'm guessing there's a -LOT- of laptops that see extremely seldom any battery-use at all.
Has to do with battery lifetime though. I need a fairly powerful laptop, which means sucky battery-life. If a laptop had 10-20 hour battery-life, I could work from home for a day or two without a power-adapter. But since I'm going to need extra juice anyway, I might as well keep the thing plugged in. (less of a hassle than swapping and charging batteries every 2-3 hours for sure)
Sorry. Your confidence in the academic indexes is too high.
True; they will contain everything that is -ALREADY- recognized as being important. But that doesn't help you much; that just tells you the stuff that the scientific community already agrees is important.
Much more interesting is the stuff that -IS- important, but which isn't recognized as such yet. That can be so for a multitude of reasons ranging from plain misunderstanding and to the work not yet being read by anyone with enough expertise to recognize the importance. Notice: *before* the importance is recognized, the experts have no reason to read the work, much less if reading it would require getting it translated first.
You'll get *most* of the important stuff *most* of the time.
But that's a VERY different statement from: Being *CERTAIN* that you've got *EVERYTHING* important.