Why should any country grant an exemption from their law in response to the threats of a corporation. Only in the U.S. would such an idiotic proposal be taken seriously. China's censorship may suck, but they shouldn't grant any corporation a special exemption from it in response to threats. It isn't like there isn't any censorship in the U.S. DMCA take down? Ring a bell?
These DRM schemes probably cost more money than they ever get back in increased revenue.
People download games for free for all kinds of reasons. That in no way means that they would actually pay money for the game if they couldn't download it. There is zero correlation between the two things.
It is just security programmers earning a paycheck:) (nothing wrong with that)
I recall Starforce going uncracked for a long time, and being used in many commercial titles. Until Reloaded released a half-dozen Starforce protected games on Christmas day, along with extensive details on how to bypass Starforce.
Interested that these are called "cracks." The more accurate term is "fixes." It is taking broken software and making it work...
The ubiquity of internet connections makes it easier to do crazier and crazier schemes based on encryption, server interaction, and obfuscation, but it doesn't change the underlying fact that piracy has little to do with sales revenue.
I doubt it is "attacks." I bet that the losses from wasted employee time and incompetent expenditures on useless hard/software exceed the costs of attacks by a couple orders of magnitude.
Exactly right. Cable companies rely on content providers for revenue, so they naturally differ to their interests. Not to mention that Comcast owns cable channels, and is now buying NBC, or that they get tons of revenue off of PPV, all stuff that high speed internet, and high quality video on the web, would diminish revenue for.
If cable companies like Comcast weren't spending more on their cable franchises (monopoly licences/payoffs) than they are on capital. Comcast juices its customers relentlessly. I used to live in the downtown of an urban area about 1/4 mile from their DC, and of course paid the exact same, for the same s**t speed as someone in the middle of nowhere. Good stuff. Free markets rule!
I try to say this to "AI" researchers, and they usually get annoyed. It is very Douglas Adams.
The point is that you can't emulate a system with infinite states using a finite machine. All you can emulate is a mechanical model of the underlying system, which is not the same thing.
Even if you emulate at the neural level, you can't emulate the infinite input array of sensory information pouring over those neurons.
It just won't work.
But if people want to keep getting checks signed, and find people dumb enough to sign them, why argue?
Of course people should get paid for their work. If the cost of software goes down, the cost of a finished device goes down, and sales and profits for hardware manufacturers go up. Why do you think every major hardware company chips in on linux development? It is smart business. Google, Apple, and thousands of other smaller companies would not exist without open source software. Not only the software itself, but the skills of programmers who have learned the art through the availability of high quality open source code. There are a lot of people making a lot of money using open source software, which is great. The smart ones recognize this and give back to the community that made them. Where's the problem?
In order for CNN to turn into BBC CNN would have to fire everyone (management, staff, reporters, personalities), increase investment in actual reporting by about 1000X, and somehow find a staff of competent people to work for them, which would probably be hard to do in the U.S.
CNN is basically a very well funded high school "journalism" workshop. There product is garbage. It is embarrassing beyond belief.
The best cable news shows in the U.S. are The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The best real news program is Democracy Now. (Judging these things in terms of critical analysis, original reporting, coverage of uncovered stories, the people interviewed, seriousness of topics covered, etc.)
The only bias CNN has is towards incompetence and stupidity. Just about every news outlet in the U.S. has the same bias.
Bias is an irrelevant issue. All political parties and politicians are continually lying and attempting to mislead the public. Any competent news organization will always be "biased" against some political party or another if it is focused on the truth.
A good news organization maintains its bias for truth regardless of the subject of coverage. Even when a news organization fails in this respect, and exercises its bias for truth with only some subjects, it can still be useful. Once a news organisation abandons the bias for truth entirely, or is simply made up of people too incompetent to discern truth from fiction, then it is totally useless.
Acorn corruption? WTF cares? With two consecutive administrations overseeing hundreds of billions of dollars in bank fraud, what is the relevance of Acorn's corruption?
Fox News is nothing but totally useless BS, mixed with the occasional bit of well crafted propaganda.
Fox News gets EVERYTHING wrong every day, because it has no purpose other than to entertain, make money, and occasionally do political favors for people who will help its owners make even more money.
The NY Times, and WA Post are government propaganda papers. It doesn't matter who pays the bills. It has nothing to do with R/D bias either. They serve that function for any administration.
The reason that newspapers are having problems making money is that all they do is reprint government and corporate press releases. Governments and corporations are quite willing to distribute their propaganda for free. Why should anyone pay for the privilege of reading that sh*te?
In order to access the internet with true anonymity you must have both a high level of technical sophistication, and you must carefully plan your access path.
It is difficult to conceive of any system that could be put in place where individuals with the determination and technical sophistication to access the internet anonymously now could not also bypass the access controls in a supposedly less anonymous system.
As mentioned, dude is probably just trying to score some contracts with oppressive governments by offering them the pipe dream of being able to lock down their citizens online.
The proposal is ridiculously impractical, and grossly contrary to the established rights and norms in civilized countries.
Tell me what the difference in install base between these two platforms is.
Tell me, isn't there a crucial difference between a monopoly operating system, where you sell to essentially the entire desktop market, and a niche proprietary smart phone platform where you sell to a couple of percentage points of the smart phone market?
And, to get back to my main point, how many independent developers make money out of Windows desktop applications?
Finally, is there not a subtle difference between a platform where the owner controls what you sell, when you sell, how you sell, and what your competition is, and a platform where the owner controls none of those things?
Run through 250k in sales (nothing in marketing terms), then make a video telling other devs to "get rich quick," and watch them write your software for free...
I have people (who don't know what they are doing) ask me all the time, why don't you develop this, or that (android, iphone, facebook, and on and on and on).
End of story is that it is a really bad investment for and independent developer to invest their own time in learning a proprietary platform or developing for it. If someone pays me to learn it, great, but apparently there are plenty of suckers willing to spend their own time on this crap, so nobody wants to pay:)
Just look at it terms of install base. Less than 20 million IPhones. If you can't make money out of the internet, or the desktop application market, then how the F! can you make money out of the IPhone market?
Now, who should be surprised that they don't exactly have their finger on the pulse of the "warez" scene?
More likely than not, VI Labs slipped them a little cash to run this story so that they can pimp some new b.s. product designed to "fight piracy" on direct download sites.
As others have pointed out, this is just about data being copied. Data is going to be copied using whatever means are available, depending on the tastes and technical abilities of the users doing the copying. Since installing a single standalone helper app still exceeds the technical capabilities of a large segment of the user population, there is always going to be some market for direct downloads, but that is a long way from saying that direct downloads will replace BT.
What is more important than where users happen to be copying data, is where data is initially being distributed. BT has now become a major network for initial distribution, at least for movies, tv, and music, which has nothing to do with the technology but with the people who are using the network.
As long as new content is being distributed on BT, it will be the preeminent P2P network. FTP networks are still major sources of original content, and as long as they are, they will continue to be a major factor in file sharing.
Direct download sites are still very much downstream, because they are only copying data from FTP or BT. They are also unlikely to attract people who distribute original content for a variety of reasons, including their commercial nature, lack of security, availability of superior technological alternatives, etc.
If RS captures a large segment of the "sucker" market by reselling what other people give away for free, good for them, but that doesn't mean they are going to replace the people who actually distribute the content in the first place.
How is this a new technology... Nothing new here accept that this pos looks far less stable than the blimps they had sailing across the Atlantic almost a century ago.
Perhaps a new bio-weapon involving trebuchets and diseased carcasses is on the horizon. That may take a few more years development though.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should any country grant an exemption from their law in response to the threats of a corporation. Only in the U.S. would such an idiotic proposal be taken seriously. China's censorship may suck, but they shouldn't grant any corporation a special exemption from it in response to threats. It isn't like there isn't any censorship in the U.S. DMCA take down? Ring a bell?
How exactly does slavery fit into your libertarian dream society?
Damn, what is that adage that has to do with carpentry, nails, and hammers?
These DRM schemes probably cost more money than they ever get back in increased revenue. People download games for free for all kinds of reasons. That in no way means that they would actually pay money for the game if they couldn't download it. There is zero correlation between the two things. It is just security programmers earning a paycheck :) (nothing wrong with that)
I recall Starforce going uncracked for a long time, and being used in many commercial titles. Until Reloaded released a half-dozen Starforce protected games on Christmas day, along with extensive details on how to bypass Starforce.
Interested that these are called "cracks." The more accurate term is "fixes." It is taking broken software and making it work...
The ubiquity of internet connections makes it easier to do crazier and crazier schemes based on encryption, server interaction, and obfuscation, but it doesn't change the underlying fact that piracy has little to do with sales revenue.
I doubt it is "attacks." I bet that the losses from wasted employee time and incompetent expenditures on useless hard/software exceed the costs of attacks by a couple orders of magnitude.
Exactly right. Cable companies rely on content providers for revenue, so they naturally differ to their interests. Not to mention that Comcast owns cable channels, and is now buying NBC, or that they get tons of revenue off of PPV, all stuff that high speed internet, and high quality video on the web, would diminish revenue for.
WTF do you plan to do with a 500 fold increase? That is about the dumbest comment I have ever read.
If cable companies like Comcast weren't spending more on their cable franchises (monopoly licences/payoffs) than they are on capital. Comcast juices its customers relentlessly. I used to live in the downtown of an urban area about 1/4 mile from their DC, and of course paid the exact same, for the same s**t speed as someone in the middle of nowhere. Good stuff. Free markets rule!
I try to say this to "AI" researchers, and they usually get annoyed. It is very Douglas Adams. The point is that you can't emulate a system with infinite states using a finite machine. All you can emulate is a mechanical model of the underlying system, which is not the same thing. Even if you emulate at the neural level, you can't emulate the infinite input array of sensory information pouring over those neurons. It just won't work. But if people want to keep getting checks signed, and find people dumb enough to sign them, why argue?
Of course people should get paid for their work. If the cost of software goes down, the cost of a finished device goes down, and sales and profits for hardware manufacturers go up. Why do you think every major hardware company chips in on linux development? It is smart business. Google, Apple, and thousands of other smaller companies would not exist without open source software. Not only the software itself, but the skills of programmers who have learned the art through the availability of high quality open source code. There are a lot of people making a lot of money using open source software, which is great. The smart ones recognize this and give back to the community that made them. Where's the problem?
In order for CNN to turn into BBC CNN would have to fire everyone (management, staff, reporters, personalities), increase investment in actual reporting by about 1000X, and somehow find a staff of competent people to work for them, which would probably be hard to do in the U.S.
CNN is basically a very well funded high school "journalism" workshop. There product is garbage. It is embarrassing beyond belief.
The best cable news shows in the U.S. are The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The best real news program is Democracy Now. (Judging these things in terms of critical analysis, original reporting, coverage of uncovered stories, the people interviewed, seriousness of topics covered, etc.)
The only bias CNN has is towards incompetence and stupidity. Just about every news outlet in the U.S. has the same bias.
Bias is an irrelevant issue. All political parties and politicians are continually lying and attempting to mislead the public. Any competent news organization will always be "biased" against some political party or another if it is focused on the truth.
A good news organization maintains its bias for truth regardless of the subject of coverage. Even when a news organization fails in this respect, and exercises its bias for truth with only some subjects, it can still be useful. Once a news organisation abandons the bias for truth entirely, or is simply made up of people too incompetent to discern truth from fiction, then it is totally useless.
That is the bulk of the U.S. media.
Relevant information? hahahahaha!
Acorn corruption? WTF cares? With two consecutive administrations overseeing hundreds of billions of dollars in bank fraud, what is the relevance of Acorn's corruption?
Fox News is nothing but totally useless BS, mixed with the occasional bit of well crafted propaganda.
Fox News gets EVERYTHING wrong every day, because it has no purpose other than to entertain, make money, and occasionally do political favors for people who will help its owners make even more money.
The NY Times, and WA Post are government propaganda papers. It doesn't matter who pays the bills. It has nothing to do with R/D bias either. They serve that function for any administration.
The reason that newspapers are having problems making money is that all they do is reprint government and corporate press releases. Governments and corporations are quite willing to distribute their propaganda for free. Why should anyone pay for the privilege of reading that sh*te?
In order to access the internet with true anonymity you must have both a high level of technical sophistication, and you must carefully plan your access path.
It is difficult to conceive of any system that could be put in place where individuals with the determination and technical sophistication to access the internet anonymously now could not also bypass the access controls in a supposedly less anonymous system.
As mentioned, dude is probably just trying to score some contracts with oppressive governments by offering them the pipe dream of being able to lock down their citizens online.
The proposal is ridiculously impractical, and grossly contrary to the established rights and norms in civilized countries.
Tell me what the difference in install base between these two platforms is.
Tell me, isn't there a crucial difference between a monopoly operating system, where you sell to essentially the entire desktop market, and a niche proprietary smart phone platform where you sell to a couple of percentage points of the smart phone market?
And, to get back to my main point, how many independent developers make money out of Windows desktop applications?
Finally, is there not a subtle difference between a platform where the owner controls what you sell, when you sell, how you sell, and what your competition is, and a platform where the owner controls none of those things?
Run through 250k in sales (nothing in marketing terms), then make a video telling other devs to "get rich quick," and watch them write your software for free...
I have people (who don't know what they are doing) ask me all the time, why don't you develop this, or that (android, iphone, facebook, and on and on and on).
:)
End of story is that it is a really bad investment for and independent developer to invest their own time in learning a proprietary platform or developing for it. If someone pays me to learn it, great, but apparently there are plenty of suckers willing to spend their own time on this crap, so nobody wants to pay
Just look at it terms of install base. Less than 20 million IPhones. If you can't make money out of the internet, or the desktop application market, then how the F! can you make money out of the IPhone market?
Now, who should be surprised that they don't exactly have their finger on the pulse of the "warez" scene?
More likely than not, VI Labs slipped them a little cash to run this story so that they can pimp some new b.s. product designed to "fight piracy" on direct download sites.
As others have pointed out, this is just about data being copied. Data is going to be copied using whatever means are available, depending on the tastes and technical abilities of the users doing the copying. Since installing a single standalone helper app still exceeds the technical capabilities of a large segment of the user population, there is always going to be some market for direct downloads, but that is a long way from saying that direct downloads will replace BT.
What is more important than where users happen to be copying data, is where data is initially being distributed. BT has now become a major network for initial distribution, at least for movies, tv, and music, which has nothing to do with the technology but with the people who are using the network.
As long as new content is being distributed on BT, it will be the preeminent P2P network. FTP networks are still major sources of original content, and as long as they are, they will continue to be a major factor in file sharing.
Direct download sites are still very much downstream, because they are only copying data from FTP or BT. They are also unlikely to attract people who distribute original content for a variety of reasons, including their commercial nature, lack of security, availability of superior technological alternatives, etc.
If RS captures a large segment of the "sucker" market by reselling what other people give away for free, good for them, but that doesn't mean they are going to replace the people who actually distribute the content in the first place.
How is this a new technology... Nothing new here accept that this pos looks far less stable than the blimps they had sailing across the Atlantic almost a century ago. Perhaps a new bio-weapon involving trebuchets and diseased carcasses is on the horizon. That may take a few more years development though.