I took the liberty of comparing the score of your comment, an essay of sorts, to the score of a random computer-generated essay (courtesy of the postmodernism generator). Care to guess which one faired better?
After tracing the entire internet to its origins, they learned what savvy insiders, politicians, and geeks knew all along:
It all started with Al Gore.
There would be, on some abstract level, a combined entity encompassing the information processing activities of all the intercommunicating computers including human brains. The world as it is *now* fits the same broad description, as we all exchange information via snail mail, books, email, Usenet, Slashdot, TV and the telephone at a somewhat slower rate. But making it faster will not cause this global dataprocessing system to become self aware in any sense which is meaningful to humans.
I like your final qualification of "meaningful to humans". I suspect that a consciousness already exists in our existing media, information, and economic infrastructures which is simply not apparent to ourselves. We are simply cells of the larger multi-cellular organism we call our society / culture / tribe / nation, and we are not aware of its consciousness any more than my hair follicles are aware of my consciousness.
"In early days, compression was all done with software because there was no hardware to do this stuff," said computer science professor Leonard Levine at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "So Katz put together a program called PKZip, the Phil Katz zip program."
"Early days" is of course in contrast to modern times, now that we all have Winzip PCI cards doing "hardware" compression. Or did the esteemed professor perhaps mean that PKZip was actually hardware? Either way...
Essentially, what "would happen" is that the megacorp threatened by the warez distribution would convince a judge that there was reason to believe you were pirating their works. The judge would allow discovery, and you would be forced to decrypt the materials yourself. You're probably right; however, this is a long, difficult, and costly process for a company to go through. If most pirated works were encrypted in this way, a company would have to work harder to "whack" each "mole".
No, that's not the point. Your method of "discovery" would not be permissable, because in order to do so, you would have to use the encryption algorithm, thus subjecting yourself to the algorithim's licensing terms. This encryption is licensed for personal use only, so neither governmental investigative bodies nor the company should be able to use it.
We all know that The MPAA has used the DMCA to structure the CSS licensing system in a way which effectively controls both DVD publishers and DVD player manufacturers. I believe that if the MPAA wins their current legal battle over DeCSS, they will set a precedent with a side-effect that is antithetical to everything the MPAA is fighting for.
Consider what would happen if an open-source encryption/decryption algorithm was created (like CSS, the strength of the algorithm is not important), with a license that explicitly forbade both commercial and governmental use. Now any warez/mp3/movie pirate could encrypt their warez and post them for the public consumption with complete impunity. No law enforcement agency or company could bring any action against this pirate, because in order to do so, they would have to prove that they performed an act of piracy in the first place, which would entail infringing upon the terms of the license of the encryption algorithm.
Perhaps the government has legal methods to work around this.. perhaps they are even built into the DMCA. Nevertheless, this sort of "restricted license" encryption, if employed by pirates, would make it more difficult for any company to protect their copyrights online.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
Posting to slashdot while masturbating? But I repeat myself...
Your score:
The score of the random computer-generated essay:
Your post, though interesting, is, by its own standards, inferior to a randomly generated essay, which apparently approached perfection itself!
Looks like you didn't deserve that "+5" interesting after all. If only we used such software to moderate Slashdot comments as well as to grade papers!
By the way, this comment is only scoring a 2 overall. Maybe I shouldn't hit submi...
After tracing the entire internet to its origins, they learned what savvy insiders, politicians, and geeks knew all along: It all started with Al Gore.
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated into the RIAA collective.
I like your final qualification of "meaningful to humans". I suspect that a consciousness already exists in our existing media, information, and economic infrastructures which is simply not apparent to ourselves. We are simply cells of the larger multi-cellular organism we call our society / culture / tribe / nation, and we are not aware of its consciousness any more than my hair follicles are aware of my consciousness.
"In early days, compression was all done with software because there was no hardware to do this stuff," said computer science professor Leonard Levine at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "So Katz put together a program called PKZip, the Phil Katz zip program."
"Early days" is of course in contrast to modern times, now that we all have Winzip PCI cards doing "hardware" compression. Or did the esteemed professor perhaps mean that PKZip was actually hardware? Either way...
Essentially, what "would happen" is that the megacorp threatened by the warez distribution would convince a judge that there was reason to believe you were pirating their works. The judge would allow discovery, and you would be forced to decrypt the materials yourself. You're probably right; however, this is a long, difficult, and costly process for a company to go through. If most pirated works were encrypted in this way, a company would have to work harder to "whack" each "mole".
No, that's not the point. Your method of "discovery" would not be permissable, because in order to do so, you would have to use the encryption algorithm, thus subjecting yourself to the algorithim's licensing terms. This encryption is licensed for personal use only, so neither governmental investigative bodies nor the company should be able to use it.
Consider what would happen if an open-source encryption/decryption algorithm was created (like CSS, the strength of the algorithm is not important), with a license that explicitly forbade both commercial and governmental use. Now any warez/mp3/movie pirate could encrypt their warez and post them for the public consumption with complete impunity. No law enforcement agency or company could bring any action against this pirate, because in order to do so, they would have to prove that they performed an act of piracy in the first place, which would entail infringing upon the terms of the license of the encryption algorithm.
Perhaps the government has legal methods to work around this.. perhaps they are even built into the DMCA. Nevertheless, this sort of "restricted license" encryption, if employed by pirates, would make it more difficult for any company to protect their copyrights online.
Lets do it! :)