Re:devestate all other competition
on
Salon on the XBox
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· Score: 2
That depends. If you want their to be competition in gaming platform hardware, then having one dominating player screws that up. On the other hand if you want to have strong competition at the game development level, then having a stable ubiquitous platform is good. Emphasis on stable here. If it's a flaky hard to work with platform then there is no benefit.
Sorry, the way I phrased that didn't come out clear. You should be able to sell your rights to an item (or give it away should you choose). But what I meant to say was that you shouldn't have to pay an additional fee to the company from whom you purchased your access to transfer your rights.
One of the things I see a growing need for is a protected right of transfer for any copyrighted material. Essentially the right protects your ability to transfer your access to any copyrighted work to another party at no cost. This right would not be limited to purchased items (something quickly dissapearing it seems), also extending to leased works where you pay for limited time access, etc.
This would make it illegal for Microsoft to sell licenses that restricted use of their product to one computer or one purchaser. The rights they convey to you would also be conveyed to any person you wished to transfer that software too. If you had permanent access to some medical database, you could transfer that access to somebody else (setting the ground for the notion of inheritance of intellectual property).
Now, to the benefit of copyright holders, I think it is fair to allow them to build in limitations that permit only one copy of an item to exist at a time. So, if you transfer your rights to an item, you cannot continue to share those rights. But I think there should also be built in requirements to allow for limited duplication of material for archival purposes (how many of us have lost our CD's to scratches?)
"(2600 publisher Eric Corley) is transporting individuals electronically to locations in order to facilitate the illegal copying of DVDs. His behavior is analogous to driving someone to a home so that they may burglarize the home."
If you assume that using DeCSS as a tool to help copy a DVD is a crime, then this analogy is still wrong. What he is doing is equivalent to giving somebody directions on how to get to a store where they sell lock picks. Now, if somebody uses the picks to break into a house, is the guy who gave directions on where to get the picks liable? Is the guy who sold the picks liable? So why on God's green (and blue) earth is Eric Corley being held responsible for a similar act?!?
Okay, Forbes comes up with the wonderful computer of the future. It's is a steril pristine, easy to use, consumer friendly, non-toxic happy computer. It has biometrics, optics, and of course no keyboard, because keyboards just aren't hip.
Now, let's talk about the computer of the future I imagine. First of all it will be a half dissasembled box with various optical cables coming out of it and a little bit of dust gathering on the exposed parts. The processor is of course tweaked in some way as to make it 1.5-2 times as fast if occasionally unstable.
The computer is hooked up via a wireless VPN to a bunch of my hacker friends all over the world where we share our thoughts, and our music in secrecy. Of course I've got a high bandwidth Internet connection. It's perfect for serving up movies, music, and games, but it's still not quite enough to handle some of the latest technologies (some things never change).
I've got several of my older computers hooked up on the other end. Sure, they are slow and primitive, but it's fun! Needless to say these are all in a state of semi-disarray, with cables in a giant spaghetti mess on the floor.
Sure, I've got one of those cool mega-displays that display everything in photographic quality in a screen the size of a desk, but I've got some throw backs. I've of course got a keyboard since those virtual keyboards are cludgy at best. I've got a scrolling LED display I found in a junk yard and managed to hook up to my box. If somebody tries to hack my box a bunch it displays a message on the LED to let me know what's happening.
Now, that sounds like my dream computer of the future! Maybe it would be nice to have something portable to go with it, but I want a box I can hack and play with.
Saying that the explosion registered a 3 on the richter scale doesn't mean a whole to to me. Does anybody know a rough translation for this into some more common measure of explosive force (lbs of TNT perhaps)?
What you are seeing isn't so much a media bias against Redhat and for Microsoft. This all comes down to a matter of newsworthiness. Everybody knows Microsoft is full of gaping security holes, so when another one comes along it isn't big news. On the other hand, when RedHat has a hole it is big news because Linux is so supposedly secure.
Really this strong coverage of redhat and weak coverage of Microsoft is just further illustration of how shoddy Microsoft's products are.
One thing that might be limiting the number of people sharing files openly is the concern over the legality of it. People may not be sharing files for fear of being targeted for a lawsuit.
Recently I've sensed a growing polarity in the Copyright debate. On the one hand it seems those in the media industry want to be able to charge for every single use of a copyrighted work, slowly encroaching even on the protected realm of fair use. On the other hand you have people who seem to think that they should be able to get everything for free.
Right now there seem to be architectures evolving for both the "everything for free" (Napster, Scour, Freenet, etc) and the "everything for a price" (SDMI, DeCSS, etc) approaches, but do you see anything that is seeking a middle ground? Do you see any developing architectures (both in the legal sense and in the technological sense) that promote a middle ground, protecting copyright holders without trampling on the rights of consumers? If there is nothing out there right now, do you have any suggestions on a framework that might work?
Tapes replaced vinyl and CD's replaced tapes. Why wouldn't this replace MP3? I mean there's no issues of backward compatibility because you don't have to buy extra hardware. I mean if you've got an MP3 player on your computer and a huge library of MP3's what would make you resist getting a player that uses a new format (which will of course still support MP3).
Furthermore, if this new format prooves to have better quality for lower bitrates then there is an additional incentive to use it. Even if it didn't people don't really have a loyalty to Codecs. People talk about MP3's because that's the only tech out there right now that provides the quality for the space constraints. It could be WAV, or AIFF, or RealAudio for all they care. Since they don't have to buy new hardware to support new codecs it doesn't matter to them.
Okay, here's a quick question for the audience. Who is this marketed for? I mean, who in this world would honestly want to have an implant like this put in them? Nobody! This is a device for people that wish to have some sort of control or monitoring over other people. So who is this really for?
The Government...
Now, if you can just turn the bloody thing off, what is the point of it as a tracking and identification device? I mean sure, they designed a switch in it to be able to turn it off, but in practice, will that switch be available? If the government decides to start using these for any purpose, you can expect that it will be implanted in criminals.
WOuldn't it be wonderful if every person who ever broke a law had an implant like this. I mean background checks would be simple, just wave a little wand in front of somebody and if it beeps you don't hire them because they are an ex-con. And of course you make it a heinous crime to remove the implant. Who can argue this logic, I mean criminals are bad and evil, right? And as we all know, all criminals are habitual offenders for life. No matter how much time they serve, are they really ever to be trusted again? Of course not!
*SIGH*
Why don't they just change the name from "Digital Angle" to "The Mark of the Beat" and be honest with us?
The point of research is to develop technology for the good of society, right? So what's wrong with combining that with capatalism?
The problem is that these are not necessarily compatible. The goal of capitalism is to make profit. That's all! All other goals (saving the whales, educating the children, cleaning the environment) are secondary to the goal of making a buck. Furthermore, this buck making is generally a very short sighted effort, looking to make money right now despite potentially dangerous long term impacts of the effort.
As the number of independent researchers diminishes, who is checking the work of these for-profit efforts. Certainly if they find out that there technologies are harmful they will do everything they can to cover it up. Non-disclosure agreements, bought off politicians, etc. Without some journalists and scientists out there asking the tough questions, free of a corporate leash, we may be in serious trouble.
Certainly there is nothing wrong with making money from technology, but there is something wrong when the independent voices challenging the impact of your developments diminishes. Furthermore there is something wrong when the amount of pure science research is being diminished by the drive for profit.
There are a lot of things in the Universe that are worth exploring on an intellectual level that are almost totally pointless at an economic level. Capitalism puts the immediate growth of profit margins above the long term growth of the human mind. What if all of the government and academic funded "pure science" research was scrapped in favor of money making technologies? Anything that doesn't have immediate applications or marketability (come see the wonders of the pharoas for a low low price of $25) wouldn't be touched.
1) How much time can you spare to commit to this? 2) What is the experience level of the students? (I know the AP CS stuff used to be in Pascal, what is it now?) 3) What resources are available to you? For example, can you get a computer to run Linux on as a server or anything like that?
Ultimately those three questions are going to limit what you can reasonably accomplish.
Are there any more details than, "we got word"? I mean far be it for me to criticize Slashdot for having occasionally printed inaccurate and unresearched stories before, but this sounds like a hoax. Now, this might be true, but can we get some links to real sources of info (legal documents, statements by copyleft, etc).
Oh and by the way, for some odd reason the ordering system at Copyleft is really swamped right now.
My impression is that if you know what you are looking for Steganography is traceable. Steganography uses the least significant bits of images, so if one analyzed the least significant bits it would show what was encrypted there. now granted, if you also used PGP the bad guys might not know what the original item was, but at least your activity is suspicious which is probably enough for them to come to your house at 3am and make you a political prisoner.
I forget what the name of this technique is, but if you need to send data surreptitiously, one thing that might help is to encode it in an image. So, take your data, encrypt it using PGP, etc. Then take the result and hide it within an image. Of course I'm not sure how easy it is to detect these sorts of operations. Sure it's easy to scan plain text messages as they go through the network, but how hard is it to scan the least significant bits of any attached images? Even if they can check that with reasonable efficiency there's also the issue that if you encrypt it they still don't know what the data was. Ah, is it called Stenography? I think that's it...
It ocurred to me that one of the fundamental problems with financial anonymity is that in order for it to work properly you must have a way to actually get money into some sort of bank or what have you. Of course banking laws require banks to gather all sorts of information about you before you can open up an account. Well, I have an idea for a way around this.
Set up a company that would sell smart cards in varying increments that would be usable for any on-line transaction (basically they can just do an electronic fund transfer or send a check to the destination). The smart cards would be sold like calling cards are today and would be readable through a reader that could be picked up for a modest sum. Once you had the card there would be no way to attach the purchases you made to your identity as long as your identity couldn't be attached to the card. That is to say, if you went to a store and paid cash, there is no connection to you and thus you can spend knowing full well you won't be tracked.
In the real world, there aren't good and bad guys, there are just people with varying motivations and drives. The X-men, although certainly in no way, "real", depicts the characters as people really are, driven by motivations, not inherently good or bad. Is Magneto evil? Should we hate him? No, he's a person who is struggling with his pain and fear, trying to find a solution to a coming crisis. Katz's cravings for cut and dry, good and evil denies the truth of the world, that nobody out there is so absolute.
Frankly the thing that I loved about this movie is the subtle differences between Xavier and Magneto. They both share the goal of protecting mutants from the idiocy of normal humans but they are coming from different backgrounds and have other issues. Xavier has a fundamental faith in the goodness of people, and Magneto, having seen the atrocities man is capable of, does not. Magneto is a "means justify the ends" type, Xavier is not (witness the scene with the police for example).
**POTENTIAL SPOILER FOLLOWS**
By far my favorite illustration of this greyness of morality in the movie was Wolverine's comment to Storm as he was leaving to get Rogue. She's wanting him to join their cause and he questions her on whether she really is on the right side of things. This is what the world is really about folks. It is about people struggling to define themselves, define what's right in their own mind, and struggling to defend what they believe. It isn't about broadly defined black and white rules of right and wrong.
So, if you like to have bad guys to hate, and good guys to love, then go watch another movie.
In that case, first of all, they tread deeply into the realm of piracy where there aren't any questions about how legal such a practice is. Second, the band could very easily download a copy themselves and the back track the information to the person who hacked their MP3 and file a lawsuit and criminal charges.
If money changes hands, then at somepoint that money has to get from the virtual to the physical and that point is very well tracked and logged. Being anonymous on the net is easy, being anonymous when you get your credit card bill or bank statement is not.
Rather than having an ad recorded that people have to sit through, I had a thought that might work a whole lot better. Have a plug-in for WinAmp, XMMS, etc, that would integrate with a modified MP3 format. The modified MP3 format would require the plugin to work.
Now, what the modification does is put a little "buy me" button on the player. When you are listening to a song, you are offered a chance to send a little money to the artist who made it. You don't HAVE to send the money, but basically you make it such a small amount that people won't mind sending it. Then you just have the system bill your credit card.
I've noticed that PayPal allows increments as small as 1 cent to be charged, so I had the thought of using Paypal somehow as the charging system. Basically it would allow a small band to start distributing, getting some money back, and would require no significant infrastructure to process.
If you wanted to take it a step further, you could provide a way for the people to buy a related CD, T-Shirt, etc. Or maybe have a contest where if you chipped in your money your name would be entered to win something cool. A personal performance of the band maybe, or autographed band items.
The trick to all this is to insure that the system is neither intrusive nor restricting. Requiring a plugin is no big deal as long as the effort to install a plugin is more effort than it is to reverse engineer it away. Asking for payment, but not being intrusive about it, insures that nobody has an incentive to break your system.
Sure, with such a system nobody is guaranteed to get a dime, but I think most people would honestly be happy to send 50 cents to an artist if they liked the song. If you get your music distributed broadly enough, the 50 cents can add up quickly.
By the way, if you want to make such a system, go right ahead. My idea is now out there in the public pool of ideas for you to use as you see fit. In fact, I beg of you to make such a system because I think artists should get money, but I want it to be easy for them to get it direct from consumers without a bunch of money glutton corporations in the middle.
Very good point! Essentially it seems that people are trying to use computers as an alternative to a qualified instructor. I think computer based quizzing can be useful, but it has to be intended as an aid to the teacher. For example, having each child work at their own pace is good, but the hints and multiple guesses does more to harm than to help.
So, what might work better is a system that logs how long each child takes, what questions they got right, etc. Then it can provide the information to the teacher. Part of this might include nice graphs to help them see where the children are doing relative to each other. Is one child falling behind? Is one child excelling? Is one child getting the right answers but taking a long time to do it? That information is useful and can be a tremendous aid to a teacher.
It seems that somebody needs to sit down and fundamentally rethink the position of the computer in a child's education. There is a reason we have teachers, and until AI gets to the point that it can replace us humans as teachers, it's best to keep them as tools.
Right, you learned a lot about computers from having been exposed to an Apple ][, but did you learn more about history, politics, science, art, or other areas of human endeavor because of it?
I think it is very clear that people learn the technical skills of computers from exposure to them (I got my first taste on an Apple ][ back in second grade). But what else do they learn? Computers are being crammed into the schools as the solution to all of the system's problems, but there's no evidence that this works.
My impression has been that if you put computers in a classroom, but don't invest in teachers who know how to use them AS A TOOL OF LEARNING, then they are of little benefit outside of learning the technology itself. There's nothing wrong with learning the technology itself, but let's not kid ourselves that by simply dumping computers into a classroom we will magically help children learn better.
Slashdot Mirror
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This would make it illegal for Microsoft to sell licenses that restricted use of their product to one computer or one purchaser. The rights they convey to you would also be conveyed to any person you wished to transfer that software too. If you had permanent access to some medical database, you could transfer that access to somebody else (setting the ground for the notion of inheritance of intellectual property).
Now, to the benefit of copyright holders, I think it is fair to allow them to build in limitations that permit only one copy of an item to exist at a time. So, if you transfer your rights to an item, you cannot continue to share those rights. But I think there should also be built in requirements to allow for limited duplication of material for archival purposes (how many of us have lost our CD's to scratches?)
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If you assume that using DeCSS as a tool to help copy a DVD is a crime, then this analogy is still wrong. What he is doing is equivalent to giving somebody directions on how to get to a store where they sell lock picks. Now, if somebody uses the picks to break into a house, is the guy who gave directions on where to get the picks liable? Is the guy who sold the picks liable? So why on God's green (and blue) earth is Eric Corley being held responsible for a similar act?!?
*sigh*
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Now, let's talk about the computer of the future I imagine. First of all it will be a half dissasembled box with various optical cables coming out of it and a little bit of dust gathering on the exposed parts. The processor is of course tweaked in some way as to make it 1.5-2 times as fast if occasionally unstable.
The computer is hooked up via a wireless VPN to a bunch of my hacker friends all over the world where we share our thoughts, and our music in secrecy. Of course I've got a high bandwidth Internet connection. It's perfect for serving up movies, music, and games, but it's still not quite enough to handle some of the latest technologies (some things never change).
I've got several of my older computers hooked up on the other end. Sure, they are slow and primitive, but it's fun! Needless to say these are all in a state of semi-disarray, with cables in a giant spaghetti mess on the floor.
Sure, I've got one of those cool mega-displays that display everything in photographic quality in a screen the size of a desk, but I've got some throw backs. I've of course got a keyboard since those virtual keyboards are cludgy at best. I've got a scrolling LED display I found in a junk yard and managed to hook up to my box. If somebody tries to hack my box a bunch it displays a message on the LED to let me know what's happening.
Now, that sounds like my dream computer of the future! Maybe it would be nice to have something portable to go with it, but I want a box I can hack and play with.
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Really this strong coverage of redhat and weak coverage of Microsoft is just further illustration of how shoddy Microsoft's products are.
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Right now there seem to be architectures evolving for both the "everything for free" (Napster, Scour, Freenet, etc) and the "everything for a price" (SDMI, DeCSS, etc) approaches, but do you see anything that is seeking a middle ground? Do you see any developing architectures (both in the legal sense and in the technological sense) that promote a middle ground, protecting copyright holders without trampling on the rights of consumers? If there is nothing out there right now, do you have any suggestions on a framework that might work?
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Furthermore, if this new format prooves to have better quality for lower bitrates then there is an additional incentive to use it. Even if it didn't people don't really have a loyalty to Codecs. People talk about MP3's because that's the only tech out there right now that provides the quality for the space constraints. It could be WAV, or AIFF, or RealAudio for all they care. Since they don't have to buy new hardware to support new codecs it doesn't matter to them.
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The Government...
Now, if you can just turn the bloody thing off, what is the point of it as a tracking and identification device? I mean sure, they designed a switch in it to be able to turn it off, but in practice, will that switch be available? If the government decides to start using these for any purpose, you can expect that it will be implanted in criminals.
WOuldn't it be wonderful if every person who ever broke a law had an implant like this. I mean background checks would be simple, just wave a little wand in front of somebody and if it beeps you don't hire them because they are an ex-con. And of course you make it a heinous crime to remove the implant. Who can argue this logic, I mean criminals are bad and evil, right? And as we all know, all criminals are habitual offenders for life. No matter how much time they serve, are they really ever to be trusted again? Of course not!
*SIGH*
Why don't they just change the name from "Digital Angle" to "The Mark of the Beat" and be honest with us?
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The problem is that these are not necessarily compatible. The goal of capitalism is to make profit. That's all! All other goals (saving the whales, educating the children, cleaning the environment) are secondary to the goal of making a buck. Furthermore, this buck making is generally a very short sighted effort, looking to make money right now despite potentially dangerous long term impacts of the effort.
As the number of independent researchers diminishes, who is checking the work of these for-profit efforts. Certainly if they find out that there technologies are harmful they will do everything they can to cover it up. Non-disclosure agreements, bought off politicians, etc. Without some journalists and scientists out there asking the tough questions, free of a corporate leash, we may be in serious trouble.
Certainly there is nothing wrong with making money from technology, but there is something wrong when the independent voices challenging the impact of your developments diminishes. Furthermore there is something wrong when the amount of pure science research is being diminished by the drive for profit.
There are a lot of things in the Universe that are worth exploring on an intellectual level that are almost totally pointless at an economic level. Capitalism puts the immediate growth of profit margins above the long term growth of the human mind. What if all of the government and academic funded "pure science" research was scrapped in favor of money making technologies? Anything that doesn't have immediate applications or marketability (come see the wonders of the pharoas for a low low price of $25) wouldn't be touched.
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1) How much time can you spare to commit to this?
2) What is the experience level of the students? (I know the AP CS stuff used to be in Pascal, what is it now?)
3) What resources are available to you? For example, can you get a computer to run Linux on as a server or anything like that?
Ultimately those three questions are going to limit what you can reasonably accomplish.
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Oh and by the way, for some odd reason the ordering system at Copyleft is really swamped right now.
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Set up a company that would sell smart cards in varying increments that would be usable for any on-line transaction (basically they can just do an electronic fund transfer or send a check to the destination). The smart cards would be sold like calling cards are today and would be readable through a reader that could be picked up for a modest sum. Once you had the card there would be no way to attach the purchases you made to your identity as long as your identity couldn't be attached to the card. That is to say, if you went to a store and paid cash, there is no connection to you and thus you can spend knowing full well you won't be tracked.
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Frankly the thing that I loved about this movie is the subtle differences between Xavier and Magneto. They both share the goal of protecting mutants from the idiocy of normal humans but they are coming from different backgrounds and have other issues. Xavier has a fundamental faith in the goodness of people, and Magneto, having seen the atrocities man is capable of, does not. Magneto is a "means justify the ends" type, Xavier is not (witness the scene with the police for example).
**POTENTIAL SPOILER FOLLOWS**
By far my favorite illustration of this greyness of morality in the movie was Wolverine's comment to Storm as he was leaving to get Rogue. She's wanting him to join their cause and he questions her on whether she really is on the right side of things. This is what the world is really about folks. It is about people struggling to define themselves, define what's right in their own mind, and struggling to defend what they believe. It isn't about broadly defined black and white rules of right and wrong.
So, if you like to have bad guys to hate, and good guys to love, then go watch another movie.
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If money changes hands, then at somepoint that money has to get from the virtual to the physical and that point is very well tracked and logged. Being anonymous on the net is easy, being anonymous when you get your credit card bill or bank statement is not.
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Now, what the modification does is put a little "buy me" button on the player. When you are listening to a song, you are offered a chance to send a little money to the artist who made it. You don't HAVE to send the money, but basically you make it such a small amount that people won't mind sending it. Then you just have the system bill your credit card.
I've noticed that PayPal allows increments as small as 1 cent to be charged, so I had the thought of using Paypal somehow as the charging system. Basically it would allow a small band to start distributing, getting some money back, and would require no significant infrastructure to process.
If you wanted to take it a step further, you could provide a way for the people to buy a related CD, T-Shirt, etc. Or maybe have a contest where if you chipped in your money your name would be entered to win something cool. A personal performance of the band maybe, or autographed band items.
The trick to all this is to insure that the system is neither intrusive nor restricting. Requiring a plugin is no big deal as long as the effort to install a plugin is more effort than it is to reverse engineer it away. Asking for payment, but not being intrusive about it, insures that nobody has an incentive to break your system.
Sure, with such a system nobody is guaranteed to get a dime, but I think most people would honestly be happy to send 50 cents to an artist if they liked the song. If you get your music distributed broadly enough, the 50 cents can add up quickly.
By the way, if you want to make such a system, go right ahead. My idea is now out there in the public pool of ideas for you to use as you see fit. In fact, I beg of you to make such a system because I think artists should get money, but I want it to be easy for them to get it direct from consumers without a bunch of money glutton corporations in the middle.
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So, what might work better is a system that logs how long each child takes, what questions they got right, etc. Then it can provide the information to the teacher. Part of this might include nice graphs to help them see where the children are doing relative to each other. Is one child falling behind? Is one child excelling? Is one child getting the right answers but taking a long time to do it? That information is useful and can be a tremendous aid to a teacher.
It seems that somebody needs to sit down and fundamentally rethink the position of the computer in a child's education. There is a reason we have teachers, and until AI gets to the point that it can replace us humans as teachers, it's best to keep them as tools.
---
I think it is very clear that people learn the technical skills of computers from exposure to them (I got my first taste on an Apple ][ back in second grade). But what else do they learn? Computers are being crammed into the schools as the solution to all of the system's problems, but there's no evidence that this works.
My impression has been that if you put computers in a classroom, but don't invest in teachers who know how to use them AS A TOOL OF LEARNING, then they are of little benefit outside of learning the technology itself. There's nothing wrong with learning the technology itself, but let's not kid ourselves that by simply dumping computers into a classroom we will magically help children learn better.
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