Don't take this as a comment on the competence of the CIA, but I'm pretty sure they'll have learned their lesson. Kidnappers (whether common criminal, or governmental criminal) can avoid this by simply not carrying cellphones whilst kidnapping, which just leaves the rest of us being tracked. Better to ensure the records aren't kept beyond their technical necessities (if any, I don't know whether cellphone towers need your lat/long) at all.
I'm not arguing that prices don't differ from region to region. My point here is that the REASON behind region codes was not to reduce costs. Rather, any reduction in costs observed elsewhere is likely a side effect of whatever the real reason was. If the purpose of region codes was actually to reduce costs, then the regions would have been distributed differently geographically, e.g. South Africa is in the Europe zone not the 'Africa' zone [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code]. 60% (and that's conservative) of the country live in what can only be described as abject poverty, and the 'wealthy' middle class still do not earn salaries comparable to European ones in going by exchange rate which is what counts because they pay European prices (+import tax). Of course it makes perfect sense to lump a country in this situation in with Europe who probably have the most expensive DVD's around going by exchange rate again, but certainly not in terms of earning power within the region. If anything, DVD region codes were used to increase costs, by not allowing someone to buy cheaper DVD's online from outside their own region, unless they just ignored the region code.
As someone living in a developing country, I can attest to the fact that region codes were not used to reduce costs! Our DVD's still cost more in a store here than ordering from amazon or similar. Add to this the fact that media chain stores here proudly proclaim they have the 'latest' season of whatever series two years after it's released to DVD on amazon, and they moan that noone is buying DVDs.
Like a list of suspected russian spies on US soil. I realize that Russia doesn't have such a law in place, so it's a bit of a moot point, but it does throw perspective on the idea that this law is effectively attempting to outlaw the counter espionage acts of other sovereign nations. If my government catches a US spy, then they are committing espionage, and when they are tried for espionage their names enter public record, making the judge (?) or the master of court records (?) or just the entire government criminals... But that's because the US should be allowed to spy on everyone on as they see fit, cause they're special...
This was my first though too! I guess we could call this effect a BAN (Biological Area Network) or a NAN (Neurological Area Network).... I'm rather partial to NAN given the computing connotations:)
True, but scrolling through a pdf using X/shh or rdp is still ridiculously slow, not to mention watching full motion video or playing a game. These are not latency issues, they are bandwidth issues.
I'd set up my home desktop so that I could use any device I own, or anyone else owns that I might borrow or use, to log in to my own account on my own machine at local desktop speeds...
I understand there are some things that need to be kept secret, for example, state/nationwide school examination papers, personal medical records, etc. That said, if your current government feels the need to classify material for longer than one election term, the chances are incredibly good that they're doing something illegal, immoral, and/or unsanctioned by you.
Actually, the general public are the MOST likely to let it fly. Where technology is concerned, they are usually unaware of their privacy being eroded, and even when they are aware, they'll trade privacy for the convenience of a shiny new gadget. Facebook, sharing location information from cell phones, etc
So let me get this straight, the more you earn the less you're taxed? I'm not an American and I know nothing about the US tax scheme, is this normal for the US or it just a Washington thing? Also, is it just me or is this really fucked up?
This is an age old economic concept, although very few businesses seem to believe in it these days. The thing is: it should make even more sense in the internet age where the costs of replicating units is negligible.
You can't copyright an idea, and you can't patent an idea, at least you shouldn't be able to. You can patent the description of a novel non-obvious process, and algorithms are the best possible descriptions of processes. The problem here is 'non-obvious'. In many fields non-obvious is not necessarily a high bar, but when it comes to software/algorithms it is an incredibly stringent criterion because algorithms are composed of well known totally obvious sub-algorithms (sort this, use hash map for that, whatever) and because the very nature of algorithms is abstract.
Novelty and non-obviousness in software is a quantitative but immeasurable property, which puts us on a slippery slope; if we allow algorithm X a patent for being non-obvious, why not algorithm Y which is only slightly more obvious. Being immeasurable we can't establish a cut off. Instead we would need to have different qualitative method of assessing the worthiness of the patent application. My suggestion would be in the case of software, "Does it do something novel?" rather than "Does it do something in a novel way?"
But even this suggestion is rendered impractical by the 'abstract' property of software and algorithms. We could argue that the first person to get voice over ip right should have been able to patent it by the criterion 'It does something novel'. But really, does it? In an abstract sense, it just transmits data, that data happens to be digitally encoded sound and that's all been done before. The source side of the communication isn't novel either, recording sound had been around for ages before anyway. The destination side of the communication introduces nothing, playing back of sound was also old hat. The only new thing was putting the three together in a specific way, and even that wasn't novel, telephones had been doing that for nearly a century, just not using TCP/IP. Again, it's a measurement problem, how do we measure how abstractly novel an action/process/result is, and for what level of abstraction? Where is the cut off?
Essentially, novelty and non-obviousness are too easily (and justly imo) challenged in the software arena. I agree completely with one of my G*P's: You should only be granted patents for specific implementations that have demonstrable effort spent on R&D, but if you patent software, you open source it too. You get royalties for a limited period of time, and everyone (i.e. society) benefits too. If you don't want to patent and open source it, you can go the trade secret route. The upshot of this is that it clears up a lot of problems in the patent defence area too. It's no longer a case of was my code copied and slightly altered, and if so how much alteration means new/novel/"no longer protected by the patent"? Instead, if someone rips your process off (even if they don't release their code) if their software bears sufficient resemblance to your process they owe you royalties.
@Zencyde: Agreed, if it isn't a sale it should be illegal to call it a sale. I'm looking forward to seeing the 'One click rent' buttons on e-shopping sites.
Although for most any boilerplate text there is "prior art". The exact wording may be copyrightable, but the general gist and I imagine large amounts of common 'legalese' are not, but then IANAL
Your anti-DRM group is comprised mostly of us nerds who have a problem with our computers not being completely under our control. Most gamers, I've found, are not nearly as savvy or idealistic.
Have to disagree. My girlfriend bought spore, and she's neither savvy nor idealistic... more like close to moral bankruptcy, but I digress. The DRM in spore required her to connect to the internet every time she started spore. We live in south africa, where uncapped ADSL only became available to consumers in the last 6 months. Back then, we were forced to use dial-up or 3g to connect to the internet, because there simply wasn't an ADSL capable exchange near enough to us, and no, we weren't living in the boondocks, we were living in cape town (3rd largest city in the country) The DRM would cause her to dailout (without notification) and leave the connection open, running up her phone bill, because she might play for hours before noticing. When the first such bill arrived... to say she was angry at spore would be an understatement. And I have to wonder how many other non-techie, non-savvy folk out there suffer similar problems from over zealous DRM side effects. Sure, in the first world the phone bill would never have been an issue, but not everyone lives there, and there are significant markets for technology in developing economies. Not that I've ever known of a game developer who even gave a crap about anyone outside of the US/Europe
The reality, is that there isn't a single game on the market that has a HIGH pirate-first-buy-later rate. Go ahead, name one, name just one!
Starcraft 1
I can't cite a study, but I can present a small sample pool of about 10 people I know. When starcraft 1 first came out I pirated it and played it through, as did most of my friends, then in our last year of school, or first year of uni. Truth was, in my small town, the game wasn't even available as an original form for months after release. Years later I the game became available on a local online store for about $5, and I bought it. Next time I went back to my home town and visited some of those friends I found original copies of starcraft 1 on the shelves of 7 out of 10 of my friends (which I found out by going to a lan gaming session that devolved into a 'classic' starcraft free for all). We all played through it again, and bought the game partly because it had become a classic, partly because we were no longer broke students, and partly because the price had come down to be roughly equivalent to a take out meal or a movie. However, we all still played the 'pirate' version with tcp networking at that lan party, using the cd keys from our original boxes
Yes, there are many games that are good and have lower pirate to owner conversion rates than they should, but some games do actually have high conversion rates. That said, is piracy fair to game developers/producers? No, it's not! Is charging $60 for a game that provides only 3~4 times the entertainment time (8 hours game play) of a big budget Hollywood movie that costs way more than the game to produce and distribute? No! And HELL NO, when you consider the comparatively low costs of digital distribution that games are more amenable to. Furthermore, one has to consider that the primary market for the latest release games is broke students and poor high school kids. Something is broken in the system, and piracy is a symptom, not a cause.
Allergies are essentially an immune response. They might be genetic, but can also develop simply from repeated exposure. Generally, if you randomly react to a substance (say peanuts) you develop anti-bodies. Some people do, some people don't, there's a lot of random 'evolution' going on in the immune system. The next time you eat peanuts, your immune system is primed to them, and can recruit those specific anti-bodies faster. The effect is cumulative, getting worse with each exposure. Obviously, the randomness of the generation of antibodies is constrained and selected for to a large extent by survival, organisms that evolve the constraint that they will never react to their primary food source will survive, organisms without this constraint don't.
Point I'm trying to make is: Allergies to some substances are more varied than others. It's entirely possible that the 'peanut' allergy is different in from one person to another, i.e. triggered by a different peptide sequence on the same protein, or even different proteins in the same food source.
So then, could the carriers who provide those sim cards be sued? Don't they also make claims about GSM compliance, at least those networks who still use GSM?
Gotta agree here. Books can supply information and often in far more detail than a lecture/class will ever be able to convey, but they're not nearly as good as conveying introductory concepts as someone who can correct you when you go wrong.
Have a look at their actual website, if they are a 'joke party', I gotta say their policies look legit and sensible to me, but then I'm a sexual liberal, so what do I know?
Conversely, I would say there are some games that benefit from a decent console controller, rather than a keyboard. Crash bandicoot and other similar arcade type games spring to mind. I don't own a console, and play PC games exclusively. Still I bought an el-cheapo USB game controller because the keyboard just sucked at controlling some games. I'm not sure, but I think it's the on/off nature of the keys on a keyboard, gave a jerky response, whereas the gamepad was much smoother. Just my two cents
Slashdot Mirror
Don't take this as a comment on the competence of the CIA, but I'm pretty sure they'll have learned their lesson. Kidnappers (whether common criminal, or governmental criminal) can avoid this by simply not carrying cellphones whilst kidnapping, which just leaves the rest of us being tracked. Better to ensure the records aren't kept beyond their technical necessities (if any, I don't know whether cellphone towers need your lat/long) at all.
I'm not arguing that prices don't differ from region to region. My point here is that the REASON behind region codes was not to reduce costs. Rather, any reduction in costs observed elsewhere is likely a side effect of whatever the real reason was. If the purpose of region codes was actually to reduce costs, then the regions would have been distributed differently geographically, e.g. South Africa is in the Europe zone not the 'Africa' zone [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code]. 60% (and that's conservative) of the country live in what can only be described as abject poverty, and the 'wealthy' middle class still do not earn salaries comparable to European ones in going by exchange rate which is what counts because they pay European prices (+import tax). Of course it makes perfect sense to lump a country in this situation in with Europe who probably have the most expensive DVD's around going by exchange rate again, but certainly not in terms of earning power within the region. If anything, DVD region codes were used to increase costs, by not allowing someone to buy cheaper DVD's online from outside their own region, unless they just ignored the region code.
As someone living in a developing country, I can attest to the fact that region codes were not used to reduce costs! Our DVD's still cost more in a store here than ordering from amazon or similar. Add to this the fact that media chain stores here proudly proclaim they have the 'latest' season of whatever series two years after it's released to DVD on amazon, and they moan that noone is buying DVDs.
Like a list of suspected russian spies on US soil. I realize that Russia doesn't have such a law in place, so it's a bit of a moot point, but it does throw perspective on the idea that this law is effectively attempting to outlaw the counter espionage acts of other sovereign nations. If my government catches a US spy, then they are committing espionage, and when they are tried for espionage their names enter public record, making the judge (?) or the master of court records (?) or just the entire government criminals... But that's because the US should be allowed to spy on everyone on as they see fit, cause they're special...
This was my first though too! I guess we could call this effect a BAN (Biological Area Network) or a NAN (Neurological Area Network) .... I'm rather partial to NAN given the computing connotations :)
Bandwidth != latency.
True, but scrolling through a pdf using X/shh or rdp is still ridiculously slow, not to mention watching full motion video or playing a game. These are not latency issues, they are bandwidth issues.
I'd set up my home desktop so that I could use any device I own, or anyone else owns that I might borrow or use, to log in to my own account on my own machine at local desktop speeds...
Shielding simply needs a Faraday cage, which doesn't need to be grounded
I understand there are some things that need to be kept secret, for example, state/nationwide school examination papers, personal medical records, etc. That said, if your current government feels the need to classify material for longer than one election term, the chances are incredibly good that they're doing something illegal, immoral, and/or unsanctioned by you.
Actually, the general public are the MOST likely to let it fly. Where technology is concerned, they are usually unaware of their privacy being eroded, and even when they are aware, they'll trade privacy for the convenience of a shiny new gadget. Facebook, sharing location information from cell phones, etc
Have you been on a package tour?
Terrorists use pen and paper to plan their attacks!!!!! Ban writing!!!
CA Signed apps?
So let me get this straight, the more you earn the less you're taxed? I'm not an American and I know nothing about the US tax scheme, is this normal for the US or it just a Washington thing? Also, is it just me or is this really fucked up?
This is an age old economic concept, although very few businesses seem to believe in it these days. The thing is: it should make even more sense in the internet age where the costs of replicating units is negligible.
You can't copyright an idea, and you can't patent an idea, at least you shouldn't be able to. You can patent the description of a novel non-obvious process, and algorithms are the best possible descriptions of processes. The problem here is 'non-obvious'. In many fields non-obvious is not necessarily a high bar, but when it comes to software/algorithms it is an incredibly stringent criterion because algorithms are composed of well known totally obvious sub-algorithms (sort this, use hash map for that, whatever) and because the very nature of algorithms is abstract.
Novelty and non-obviousness in software is a quantitative but immeasurable property, which puts us on a slippery slope; if we allow algorithm X a patent for being non-obvious, why not algorithm Y which is only slightly more obvious. Being immeasurable we can't establish a cut off. Instead we would need to have different qualitative method of assessing the worthiness of the patent application. My suggestion would be in the case of software, "Does it do something novel?" rather than "Does it do something in a novel way?"
But even this suggestion is rendered impractical by the 'abstract' property of software and algorithms. We could argue that the first person to get voice over ip right should have been able to patent it by the criterion 'It does something novel'. But really, does it? In an abstract sense, it just transmits data, that data happens to be digitally encoded sound and that's all been done before. The source side of the communication isn't novel either, recording sound had been around for ages before anyway. The destination side of the communication introduces nothing, playing back of sound was also old hat. The only new thing was putting the three together in a specific way, and even that wasn't novel, telephones had been doing that for nearly a century, just not using TCP/IP. Again, it's a measurement problem, how do we measure how abstractly novel an action/process/result is, and for what level of abstraction? Where is the cut off?
Essentially, novelty and non-obviousness are too easily (and justly imo) challenged in the software arena. I agree completely with one of my G*P's: You should only be granted patents for specific implementations that have demonstrable effort spent on R&D, but if you patent software, you open source it too. You get royalties for a limited period of time, and everyone (i.e. society) benefits too. If you don't want to patent and open source it, you can go the trade secret route. The upshot of this is that it clears up a lot of problems in the patent defence area too. It's no longer a case of was my code copied and slightly altered, and if so how much alteration means new/novel/"no longer protected by the patent"? Instead, if someone rips your process off (even if they don't release their code) if their software bears sufficient resemblance to your process they owe you royalties.
@Zencyde: Agreed, if it isn't a sale it should be illegal to call it a sale. I'm looking forward to seeing the 'One click rent' buttons on e-shopping sites.
Although for most any boilerplate text there is "prior art". The exact wording may be copyrightable, but the general gist and I imagine large amounts of common 'legalese' are not, but then IANAL
Your anti-DRM group is comprised mostly of us nerds who have a problem with our computers not being completely under our control. Most gamers, I've found, are not nearly as savvy or idealistic.
Have to disagree. My girlfriend bought spore, and she's neither savvy nor idealistic... more like close to moral bankruptcy, but I digress. The DRM in spore required her to connect to the internet every time she started spore. We live in south africa, where uncapped ADSL only became available to consumers in the last 6 months. Back then, we were forced to use dial-up or 3g to connect to the internet, because there simply wasn't an ADSL capable exchange near enough to us, and no, we weren't living in the boondocks, we were living in cape town (3rd largest city in the country) The DRM would cause her to dailout (without notification) and leave the connection open, running up her phone bill, because she might play for hours before noticing. When the first such bill arrived... to say she was angry at spore would be an understatement. And I have to wonder how many other non-techie, non-savvy folk out there suffer similar problems from over zealous DRM side effects. Sure, in the first world the phone bill would never have been an issue, but not everyone lives there, and there are significant markets for technology in developing economies. Not that I've ever known of a game developer who even gave a crap about anyone outside of the US/Europe
The reality, is that there isn't a single game on the market that has a HIGH pirate-first-buy-later rate. Go ahead, name one, name just one!
Starcraft 1
I can't cite a study, but I can present a small sample pool of about 10 people I know. When starcraft 1 first came out I pirated it and played it through, as did most of my friends, then in our last year of school, or first year of uni. Truth was, in my small town, the game wasn't even available as an original form for months after release. Years later I the game became available on a local online store for about $5, and I bought it. Next time I went back to my home town and visited some of those friends I found original copies of starcraft 1 on the shelves of 7 out of 10 of my friends (which I found out by going to a lan gaming session that devolved into a 'classic' starcraft free for all). We all played through it again, and bought the game partly because it had become a classic, partly because we were no longer broke students, and partly because the price had come down to be roughly equivalent to a take out meal or a movie. However, we all still played the 'pirate' version with tcp networking at that lan party, using the cd keys from our original boxes
Yes, there are many games that are good and have lower pirate to owner conversion rates than they should, but some games do actually have high conversion rates. That said, is piracy fair to game developers/producers? No, it's not! Is charging $60 for a game that provides only 3~4 times the entertainment time (8 hours game play) of a big budget Hollywood movie that costs way more than the game to produce and distribute? No! And HELL NO, when you consider the comparatively low costs of digital distribution that games are more amenable to. Furthermore, one has to consider that the primary market for the latest release games is broke students and poor high school kids. Something is broken in the system, and piracy is a symptom, not a cause.
Allergies are essentially an immune response. They might be genetic, but can also develop simply from repeated exposure. Generally, if you randomly react to a substance (say peanuts) you develop anti-bodies. Some people do, some people don't, there's a lot of random 'evolution' going on in the immune system. The next time you eat peanuts, your immune system is primed to them, and can recruit those specific anti-bodies faster. The effect is cumulative, getting worse with each exposure. Obviously, the randomness of the generation of antibodies is constrained and selected for to a large extent by survival, organisms that evolve the constraint that they will never react to their primary food source will survive, organisms without this constraint don't.
Point I'm trying to make is: Allergies to some substances are more varied than others. It's entirely possible that the 'peanut' allergy is different in from one person to another, i.e. triggered by a different peptide sequence on the same protein, or even different proteins in the same food source.
So then, could the carriers who provide those sim cards be sued? Don't they also make claims about GSM compliance, at least those networks who still use GSM?
Gotta agree here. Books can supply information and often in far more detail than a lecture/class will ever be able to convey, but they're not nearly as good as conveying introductory concepts as someone who can correct you when you go wrong.
Have a look at their actual website, if they are a 'joke party', I gotta say their policies look legit and sensible to me, but then I'm a sexual liberal, so what do I know?
Conversely, I would say there are some games that benefit from a decent console controller, rather than a keyboard. Crash bandicoot and other similar arcade type games spring to mind. I don't own a console, and play PC games exclusively. Still I bought an el-cheapo USB game controller because the keyboard just sucked at controlling some games. I'm not sure, but I think it's the on/off nature of the keys on a keyboard, gave a jerky response, whereas the gamepad was much smoother. Just my two cents