*sigh* DeCSS is/only/ to deencrypt the movie. DeCSS has nothing to do with regions. You can need DeCSS to watch a region "0" movie. You don't need DeCSS to watch an unencrypted region 2 movie.
This it technically true, but for all practical purposes it might as well be false.
If the only way to view an encrypted DVD were with a licensed DVD player, and all licensed players respected region codes, then there'd be no way to view a region coded disc outside of the region for which it was coded!
The existence of DeCSS allows the creation of unlicensed players of encrypted discs. These unlicensed players may ignore the region code, allowing a disc to be played outside of its intended region. In this way, DeCSS and region coding are very mutch intertwined.
RPM is a very big part of it, though. Remember, data transfer rates depend on both bandwidth and latency. If you don't increase the rotational speed, you'll never cut the latency associated with the drive since even with the highest densities and the fastest heads, you need to wait for the data you want to read to come around. Sacrificing latency for the sake of bandwidth is what RAMBUS did with their ram. It's a poor choice, in general.
If you want to stream hi-res video from a nicely laid out contiguous file, high density is great. If you want fast random access to a disk-based database, or a faster swap partition, it's absolutely essential to get the rotational speed up.
The property of "digital works" that allows perfect copying is that they are representable by a string of characters of a fixed, finite alphabet. (0's and 1's) By replicating this pattern of 0's and 1's, you've replicated the work.
This is no different than books, poems, or any other work consisting of a string of characters. Anyone with a printing press can make a "perfect copy" of a printed book by replicating the same string of characters found in the original. This was as true of works published in 1702 as it is in 2002. There is no fundamental difference.
What has changed is the ecconomic barriers to making copies. It's not that something is fundamentally different about digital works, it's just that it's a little bit easier to do it.
I imagine it's probably also kind of hard to aim, since neutrinos are so hard to see in the first place.
It's not that hard. Don't think of it as aiming a gun. Think of it as aiming a flashlight. As the neutrino beam travels, it spreads out into a cone. The further away you get the "dimmer" the beam gets because the neutrino density goes down, but as long as you can generally aim the beam with some coarse precision, it doesn't matter how far away your target is, you can hit it.
There is *no* enclosure around the tubes. They *are* just floating in the drink. Well, not really floating. There are metal straps which wrap around them and hold them down. Since they're mostly vaccuum inside, they're much less dense then water and would float to the surface very quickly if you let them go. The theory is that the shockwave hit them at such an angle that they twisted and it was these metal straps which held them too tightly and caused enough pressure at fairly narrow places to cause them to implode.
It's actually rather unlike that they'll miss nuetrino events because of such a change. I've had the oppurtunity to look at individual event plots and raw data, and the Cerenkov light from a single event actually registers in a considerable fraction of the tank. IIRC, typically 5-30% of detectors see each event.
This isn't entirely true. It depends a lot on the type of event. The pictures you probably saw were either of an atmospheric neutrino event, a cosmic ray background event, or one of the K2K events. In all of these cases, the particle in the detector will have somewhere between 100 and 5000 MeV of energy (and in some cases more).
As a particle travels through matter, it loses energy as it goes. The more energy it has to start with, the longer it will go before it stops. A general rule of thumb is that a muon travelling through water loses 2MeV for every centimeter travelled. So a 100MeV muon produced by a neutrino interaction would travel for 50cm. The higher the energy, the longer the track, the longer the track, the more light produced, the more light produced, the easier it is to see.
Very high energy cosmic ray muons will produce so much light that every tube in the detector will register a hit. A typical high energy event picture is here. Would you see the pattern with half as many pixels? Of course.
The problem is that "solar neutrinos", neutrinos which come from the sun, typically have much lower energies. (Only 1-10 MeV) So low, that even before the accident, SK would miss most of them (anything below 5MeV) because they just didn't produce enough light to be distinguishable from random noise in the dector or the decay of stray radon particles. If you look at pictures of these events, normally you can't see anything by eye. There's just a few photons (5-10) which are recorded which can only be identified as a real event by their timing because you can triangulate back to a single point based on their arrival time at the PMTs. Solar neutrino physicists rarely post event display photos because there's so little to see in them. Even then, it's hard to distinguish solar neutrino events from noise. In fact, it's not possible to identify an individual event as a solar neutrino event and not a radon event that looks like a solar neutrino event. It can only be done statistically. (Radon events don't point in any particular direction, while solar events all come from the sun, so you can compare the number of events coming from the sun and the number of events apparently coming from other directions and do a background subtraction.)
It's these types of events which will be hurt most by the loss of the extra tubes.
the possibility of a chain reaction implosion has been tested before (we're not idiots), and the tubes came through those tests ok.
Of course, but at what depth/pressure was this test conducted? (I honestly don't remember. Brett suggested it was maybe 10 meters.) If the same test were conducted at 30 or 40 meters it might have made a difference.
Also, it may be statistical in nature. The test was not performed sufficiently often to rule out chain reactions at 95%.
And those tests weren't performed with 6 year old tubes, either. There are so many unknowns here it isn't funny.
While the accident is a tragic blow to some valid and interesting research, no one should lose any sleep over the possibility of being unable to analyze the next big supernova before it can be repaired. After all, supernovae on the scale of SN1987A occur once every few hundred years (the last two occurred in 1054 and 1572.) I suspect repairing Super-K will take significantly faster than that.
Two things:
Deterministic probability doesn't work. A rate of 1/500 years means that in any given year, there's a 0.2% chance of a near-by supernova. The fact that there was one recently doesn't rule out that the next one could happen tomorrow. If you're going to watch for a SN, it's better to be ready for it as much of the time as possible. The fact that it's so rare makes it more important to be ready for it, not less. If one happened every day, no one would care about missing one.
SuperK was much more sensitive than the detectors used to detect the 1987A supernova. In other words, it doesn't need a "big" (nearby) supernova in order to be able to see it. A supernova which is further away, and not visible to the naked eye, would still produce a detectable neutrino pulse which would provide more scientific information than the 1987A observation with comparatively crude equipment. SuperK was even sensitive enough to detect extragalactic supernovae in the neighboring Andromeda galaxy. The ability to increase the volume of space you're observing means that you've greatly increased the observation rate as well. It's still a rare event, but it's no longer miniscule.
The chain-reaction-implosion mechanism is a plausable one, but it still requires something to make it happen.. these tubes have been sitting under a lot of hydrostatic pressure (more than during the accident) for years now.
This isn't quite true. Most of the tubes have been underwater for years, but this summer the tank was drained, dead tubes were replaced with new ones, and the tank was in the process of being refilled when the accident occurred. It was only about 2/3 full when it happened. I don't know yet if the first tube to go was brand new or not, but it's conceivable that as the water level was rising, pressure was increasing on a new tube that had a manufacturing defect and it imploded.
Although the most common failure mode is slow leakage, it only takes 1 / 11000 to implode and cause this kind of chain reaction.
There's already (at least) 5 states of matter: solid, gas, liquid, plasma (gas so hot that it gets ionized - the sun's made out of it), and the recently confirmed Bose-Einstein Condensate [colorado.edu] (gas so cold that weird quantum things start to happen).
There are also higher temperature states above plasma. A plasma is a gas that's so hot the kinetic energy of the atoms is larger than the binding energy of the electrons and they get stripped.
If you raise the temperature more (a lot more) above the binding energy of nucleons in the nucleus, all nuclei break down and you have a gas of just protons and electrons.
Beyond that, there might be a state where the nucleons themselves break apart into a "quark-gluon plasma". This hasn't been experimentally discovered yet, but it's what they're looking for at RHIC.
When you sell a complete hardware system and you therefore know what all the hardware is supposed to be, the linux installation process can be as simple as fips, fdisk, mke2fs, tar -x, lilo, reboot. This entire process can be easily scripted in such a way that all the user needs is to "drop a CD in the tray and have a program install itself". There's no need for user interaction, hardware detection, or any of the usual problems associated with an install. It could be done in a way that's easy enough for Joe Consumer.
New Jersey has the Trenton Computer Festival every year. The outdoor flea market there has just about everything imaginable. The latest hi-tech gadgets on one table, Commodore-64's on the next.
Basically, the IBM design replaces the single gun with a matrix of them, which sounds like a win
No, that's not what was done. (Ignoring the fact that color displays have three guns, I'll talk about monochrome displays instead...)
There isn't a matrix of guns, there's still just the one, it's just that the cathode size is now huge. With a traditional cathode tube, the cathode is small and it makes a very fine beam which is always on and swept across the display.
This new technology also uses a single cathode, but it's big, and produces a beam as big as the display, so you don't have to sweep it. In both cases you have one gun which is always on.
The power consumption is the same. In the old design you're spitting out N electrons per second and at any given instant in time a single pixel is receiving the entire output of the gun for a very short time. In the new design, you still output N electrons per second, but the electrons received by any given pixel are spread out in time, rather than all arriving at the same time.
This kind of design won't have any need to flicker anything. There is no concept of refresh with a device like this. One moment of time is the same as any other. (Assuming a static image.)
You seem to mistake the ability to take something with the right to take something.
No, I do not. I fully understand the difference and I also fully support the all of the rights of copyright holders up to but not including the DMCA.
You say, I'm just copying numbers
I said no such thing. The "information wants to be free" or "it's just numbers" arguments are bunk and we all know that. Copyright exists for a reason and we should support it, but there needs to be a balance between the copyright holder's rights and the end user's right. DRM technologies tip the scales too far in favor of the rights holders.
Just because someone leaves their door unlocked doesn't give you the right to enter their house and take pictures of it.
Of course not, but, if you sell me a picture of your house, you shouldn't have the right to come in to my house and tell me where I can or can not hang it. DRM controls how the end user is able to make use of purchased copyrighted material, something which was never before allowed prior to the DMCA. This is going too far.
The only "risk" I see DRM posing to Open Source products, is that they may not get support for some multimedia apps that Win/Mac does.
But this is the problem. It's not a "risk" or something that might "limit" the growth of Linux on the desktop. It's the fundamental killer of free software at home. As broadband becomes more popular and streaming audio and video from the net becomes ubiquitous, any operating system that can't make use of the media out there is dead. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference what alternative tools free software coders release, if people can't view the media they want, they'll stay away from free systems.
Combatting these kinds of technology is best done on multiple fronts. Yes, contacting senators and such is a good idea, but even the complete repeal of the DMCA is not sufficient to combat DRM technologies. The repeal of the DMCA would make breaking DRM legal again, but it would not make the impossition of DRM illegal. Therefore we still need technological countermeasures to break these systems as they're introduced.
Handy draws distinctions between DRM technologies and Open Source software. And does so quite convincingly, in my opinion.
Are DRM technologies at odds with the principles of Free Software? Sure, that's an easy argument to make. But it's completely off-topic, because it has nothing to do with what Handy said.
My point exactly. It has nothing to do with what Handy said and everything to do with what Handy failed to say.
It's not possible to build DRM into a Free Software system. It just won't work. If you support DRM systems like SDMI, you're putting media out there which is fundamentally incompatible with Free systems. You can try to separate DRM technologies and Open Source software, but doing so means that you're going to keep Open Source systems off the desktop and, in many cases off the server, indefinitely as long as there is DRM controlled media out there that customers want to use. Saying that you support both is a paradox. What's interesting is that Handy tip toes around this paradox and makes a hand waving argument about the author's right to choose without mentioning any of the implications of supporting the technological enforcement of such rights.
End users at the moment, and probably for a long time, are not capable of making full use of a computer without a diluted interface. To clarify, there will always be a need for a programmer to prepare the tools
You completely miss the point.
Of course the average end user lacks the skills to modify and adapt the source. Your average accountant can't understand the source to his spreadsheet, buthe can find someone who does. If having feature X in program Y is going to make or break his business, he can quite easily contract out to a development firm to add feature X to open source program Y, and it doesn't matter what the agenda of program Y's original authors is. Doing this with proprietary code would require recoding the application from the ground up which is almost always cost prohibitive. This is the essential difference. This is the end user's power.
Handy skirts around the main issues revolving around DRM technologies like CPRM and SDMI. He tries to portray them as separable from Free Software issues, when in reality, they are not.
The main purpose of Free Software is to place the power of the computer fully within the hands of the end user. With Free Software, the end user is capable of doing anything that can conceivably be done with the machine. DRM technologies work the other way around. They rely on manufacturers or closed source software developers to cripple the machine in ways that prohibit the end user from performing certain actions which the machine would otherwise be able to do.
I don't think you can reconcile these two approaches. You can not simultaneous provide the end user complete and total control over the hardware that he owns and still have digital rights management in place. There simply is no way for these two ideals to coexist peacefully since they are diametrically opposed to one another.
Good god almighty, y'all better beleive we got cell towers all over the friggin' place. Worse, because it's so flat in the Texas Panhandle, you can't go from one place to the other without actually being in visual range of a cell tower.
But that's actually just another example of how the cell size in Texas is so large.
In Japan, you never see the cell towers becuase they don't really tower very much. They're just little transcievers that sit on the tops of buildings, almost completely out of sight. You don't need to build massive towers because you're only transmitting very short distances.
Because a Texas tower is designed to serve an area many miles across, you need a big tower to do it.
The reason Japanese phones are smaller, lighter, and have longer battery life than American equivalents is because the cell size is much smaller.
Optimal cell size is a function of population density. In the Tokyo area, you've got about a billion people per square foot, so you can afford to keep the cell size small, which means you don't need a lot of power to transmit.
If you were to try to use the same cell size in a place like Texas, you'd be putting up more cell towers than there are people. It's just not economically feasable to do that.
Americans want phones they can take anywhere in the country and have them work. They need a big battery and a high power transmitter to make that work.
Here in the building where I work in Ibaraki-prefecture there's almost no cell coverage because we're a government lab (KEK) and you can't place a cell tower on government property according to Japanese law. People have to run to the roof whenever their cell phone rings. The lab isn't that big, either. It' can't me much more than a couple of square kilometers. Once you get off the lab, your phone works pretty much everywhere.
Don't expect to see Japan-sized phones in the U.S. any time soon. We need a ten-fold increase in population density before it will become practical.
There's a four part radio series called "Corporation, Corporation" that details the history of corporate law. A corporate death penalty is actually not a new thing. Prior to the twentieth century, corporate charters could, and frequently were, revoked if the company broke serious laws.
If you get a chance to hear the program, I really recommend it. I don't think there's a copy online anywhere, but it's for sale on tape at 100fires.
Slashdot Mirror
*sigh* DeCSS is /only/ to deencrypt the movie. DeCSS has nothing to do with regions. You can need DeCSS to watch a region "0" movie. You don't need DeCSS to watch an unencrypted region 2 movie.
This it technically true, but for all practical purposes it might as well be false.
If the only way to view an encrypted DVD were with a licensed DVD player, and all licensed players respected region codes, then there'd be no way to view a region coded disc outside of the region for which it was coded!
The existence of DeCSS allows the creation of unlicensed players of encrypted discs. These unlicensed players may ignore the region code, allowing a disc to be played outside of its intended region. In this way, DeCSS and region coding are very mutch intertwined.
RPM is a very big part of it, though. Remember, data transfer rates depend on both bandwidth and latency. If you don't increase the rotational speed, you'll never cut the latency associated with the drive since even with the highest densities and the fastest heads, you need to wait for the data you want to read to come around. Sacrificing latency for the sake of bandwidth is what RAMBUS did with their ram. It's a poor choice, in general.
If you want to stream hi-res video from a nicely laid out contiguous file, high density is great. If you want fast random access to a disk-based database, or a faster swap partition, it's absolutely essential to get the rotational speed up.
If this isn't the form your company prefers for doing their own internal modifications, then this isn't the source code!
The property of "digital works" that allows perfect copying is that they are representable by a string of characters of a fixed, finite alphabet. (0's and 1's) By replicating this pattern of 0's and 1's, you've replicated the work.
This is no different than books, poems, or any other work consisting of a string of characters. Anyone with a printing press can make a "perfect copy" of a printed book by replicating the same string of characters found in the original. This was as true of works published in 1702 as it is in 2002. There is no fundamental difference.
What has changed is the ecconomic barriers to making copies. It's not that something is fundamentally different about digital works, it's just that it's a little bit easier to do it.
I imagine it's probably also kind of hard to aim, since neutrinos are so hard to see in the first place.
It's not that hard. Don't think of it as aiming a gun. Think of it as aiming a flashlight. As the neutrino beam travels, it spreads out into a cone. The further away you get the "dimmer" the beam gets because the neutrino density goes down, but as long as you can generally aim the beam with some coarse precision, it doesn't matter how far away your target is, you can hit it.
There is *no* enclosure around the tubes. They *are* just floating in the drink. Well, not really floating. There are metal straps which wrap around them and hold them down. Since they're mostly vaccuum inside, they're much less dense then water and would float to the surface very quickly if you let them go. The theory is that the shockwave hit them at such an angle that they twisted and it was these metal straps which held them too tightly and caused enough pressure at fairly narrow places to cause them to implode.
It's actually rather unlike that they'll miss nuetrino events because of such a change. I've had the oppurtunity to look at individual event plots and raw data, and the Cerenkov light from a single event actually registers in a considerable fraction of the tank. IIRC, typically 5-30% of detectors see each event.
This isn't entirely true. It depends a lot on the type of event. The pictures you probably saw were either of an atmospheric neutrino event, a cosmic ray background event, or one of the K2K events. In all of these cases, the particle in the detector will have somewhere between 100 and 5000 MeV of energy (and in some cases more).
As a particle travels through matter, it loses energy as it goes. The more energy it has to start with, the longer it will go before it stops. A general rule of thumb is that a muon travelling through water loses 2MeV for every centimeter travelled. So a 100MeV muon produced by a neutrino interaction would travel for 50cm. The higher the energy, the longer the track, the longer the track, the more light produced, the more light produced, the easier it is to see.
Very high energy cosmic ray muons will produce so much light that every tube in the detector will register a hit. A typical high energy event picture is here. Would you see the pattern with half as many pixels? Of course.
The problem is that "solar neutrinos", neutrinos which come from the sun, typically have much lower energies. (Only 1-10 MeV) So low, that even before the accident, SK would miss most of them (anything below 5MeV) because they just didn't produce enough light to be distinguishable from random noise in the dector or the decay of stray radon particles. If you look at pictures of these events, normally you can't see anything by eye. There's just a few photons (5-10) which are recorded which can only be identified as a real event by their timing because you can triangulate back to a single point based on their arrival time at the PMTs. Solar neutrino physicists rarely post event display photos because there's so little to see in them. Even then, it's hard to distinguish solar neutrino events from noise. In fact, it's not possible to identify an individual event as a solar neutrino event and not a radon event that looks like a solar neutrino event. It can only be done statistically. (Radon events don't point in any particular direction, while solar events all come from the sun, so you can compare the number of events coming from the sun and the number of events apparently coming from other directions and do a background subtraction.)
It's these types of events which will be hurt most by the loss of the extra tubes.
the possibility of a chain reaction implosion has been tested before (we're not idiots), and the tubes came through those tests ok.
Of course, but at what depth/pressure was this test conducted? (I honestly don't remember. Brett suggested it was maybe 10 meters.) If the same test were conducted at 30 or 40 meters it might have made a difference.
Also, it may be statistical in nature. The test was not performed sufficiently often to rule out chain reactions at 95%.
And those tests weren't performed with 6 year old tubes, either. There are so many unknowns here it isn't funny.
Two things:
Deterministic probability doesn't work. A rate of 1/500 years means that in any given year, there's a 0.2% chance of a near-by supernova. The fact that there was one recently doesn't rule out that the next one could happen tomorrow. If you're going to watch for a SN, it's better to be ready for it as much of the time as possible. The fact that it's so rare makes it more important to be ready for it, not less. If one happened every day, no one would care about missing one.
SuperK was much more sensitive than the detectors used to detect the 1987A supernova. In other words, it doesn't need a "big" (nearby) supernova in order to be able to see it. A supernova which is further away, and not visible to the naked eye, would still produce a detectable neutrino pulse which would provide more scientific information than the 1987A observation with comparatively crude equipment. SuperK was even sensitive enough to detect extragalactic supernovae in the neighboring Andromeda galaxy. The ability to increase the volume of space you're observing means that you've greatly increased the observation rate as well. It's still a rare event, but it's no longer miniscule.
The chain-reaction-implosion mechanism is a plausable one, but it still requires something to make it happen.. these tubes have been sitting under a lot of hydrostatic pressure (more than during the accident) for years now.
This isn't quite true. Most of the tubes have been underwater for years, but this summer the tank was drained, dead tubes were replaced with new ones, and the tank was in the process of being refilled when the accident occurred. It was only about 2/3 full when it happened. I don't know yet if the first tube to go was brand new or not, but it's conceivable that as the water level was rising, pressure was increasing on a new tube that had a manufacturing defect and it imploded.
Although the most common failure mode is slow leakage, it only takes 1 / 11000 to implode and cause this kind of chain reaction.
(Loved your egg sandwhich paper, BTW.)
There's already (at least) 5 states of matter: solid, gas, liquid, plasma (gas so hot that it gets ionized - the sun's made out of it), and the recently confirmed Bose-Einstein Condensate [colorado.edu] (gas so cold that weird quantum things start to happen).
There are also higher temperature states above plasma. A plasma is a gas that's so hot the kinetic energy of the atoms is larger than the binding energy of the electrons and they get stripped.
If you raise the temperature more (a lot more) above the binding energy of nucleons in the nucleus, all nuclei break down and you have a gas of just protons and electrons.
Beyond that, there might be a state where the nucleons themselves break apart into a "quark-gluon plasma". This hasn't been experimentally discovered yet, but it's what they're looking for at RHIC.
I think you missed his point.
When you sell a complete hardware system and you therefore know what all the hardware is supposed to be, the linux installation process can be as simple as fips, fdisk, mke2fs, tar -x, lilo, reboot. This entire process can be easily scripted in such a way that all the user needs is to "drop a CD in the tray and have a program install itself". There's no need for user interaction, hardware detection, or any of the usual problems associated with an install. It could be done in a way that's easy enough for Joe Consumer.
New Jersey has the Trenton Computer Festival every year. The outdoor flea market there has just about everything imaginable. The latest hi-tech gadgets on one table, Commodore-64's on the next.
Basically, the IBM design replaces the single gun with a matrix of them, which sounds like a win
No, that's not what was done. (Ignoring the fact that color displays have three guns, I'll talk about monochrome displays instead...)
There isn't a matrix of guns, there's still just the one, it's just that the cathode size is now huge. With a traditional cathode tube, the cathode is small and it makes a very fine beam which is always on and swept across the display.
This new technology also uses a single cathode, but it's big, and produces a beam as big as the display, so you don't have to sweep it. In both cases you have one gun which is always on.
The power consumption is the same. In the old design you're spitting out N electrons per second and at any given instant in time a single pixel is receiving the entire output of the gun for a very short time. In the new design, you still output N electrons per second, but the electrons received by any given pixel are spread out in time, rather than all arriving at the same time.
This kind of design won't have any need to flicker anything. There is no concept of refresh with a device like this. One moment of time is the same as any other. (Assuming a static image.)
Sonic booms were heard up to 100 miles from the meteor's path ... would have been traveling between 100 mph and 200 mph.
Wow. Anything that can travel less than 200 mph and still make sonic booms is worth a headline.
Where do they get these reporters? Slashdot?
Do the math!
300KB/s = 300 * 8 Kb/s = 2400 Kb/s = 2.4 Mb/s
That's way higer than typical "DSL speeds".
You seem to mistake the ability to take something with the right to take something.
No, I do not. I fully understand the difference and I also fully support the all of the rights of copyright holders up to but not including the DMCA.
You say, I'm just copying numbers
I said no such thing. The "information wants to be free" or "it's just numbers" arguments are bunk and we all know that. Copyright exists for a reason and we should support it, but there needs to be a balance between the copyright holder's rights and the end user's right. DRM technologies tip the scales too far in favor of the rights holders.
Just because someone leaves their door unlocked doesn't give you the right to enter their house and take pictures of it.
Of course not, but, if you sell me a picture of your house, you shouldn't have the right to come in to my house and tell me where I can or can not hang it. DRM controls how the end user is able to make use of purchased copyrighted material, something which was never before allowed prior to the DMCA. This is going too far.
The only "risk" I see DRM posing to Open Source products, is that they may not get support for some multimedia apps that Win/Mac does.
But this is the problem. It's not a "risk" or something that might "limit" the growth of Linux on the desktop. It's the fundamental killer of free software at home. As broadband becomes more popular and streaming audio and video from the net becomes ubiquitous, any operating system that can't make use of the media out there is dead. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference what alternative tools free software coders release, if people can't view the media they want, they'll stay away from free systems.
Combatting these kinds of technology is best done on multiple fronts. Yes, contacting senators and such is a good idea, but even the complete repeal of the DMCA is not sufficient to combat DRM technologies. The repeal of the DMCA would make breaking DRM legal again, but it would not make the impossition of DRM illegal. Therefore we still need technological countermeasures to break these systems as they're introduced.
Handy draws distinctions between DRM technologies and Open Source software. And does so quite convincingly, in my opinion.
Are DRM technologies at odds with the principles of Free Software? Sure, that's an easy argument to make. But it's completely off-topic, because it has nothing to do with what Handy said.
My point exactly. It has nothing to do with what Handy said and everything to do with what Handy failed to say.
It's not possible to build DRM into a Free Software system. It just won't work. If you support DRM systems like SDMI, you're putting media out there which is fundamentally incompatible with Free systems. You can try to separate DRM technologies and Open Source software, but doing so means that you're going to keep Open Source systems off the desktop and, in many cases off the server, indefinitely as long as there is DRM controlled media out there that customers want to use. Saying that you support both is a paradox. What's interesting is that Handy tip toes around this paradox and makes a hand waving argument about the author's right to choose without mentioning any of the implications of supporting the technological enforcement of such rights.
End users at the moment, and probably for a long time, are not capable of making full use of a computer without a diluted interface. To clarify, there will always be a need for a programmer to prepare the tools
You completely miss the point.
Of course the average end user lacks the skills to modify and adapt the source. Your average accountant can't understand the source to his spreadsheet, but he can find someone who does. If having feature X in program Y is going to make or break his business, he can quite easily contract out to a development firm to add feature X to open source program Y, and it doesn't matter what the agenda of program Y's original authors is. Doing this with proprietary code would require recoding the application from the ground up which is almost always cost prohibitive. This is the essential difference. This is the end user's power.
Handy skirts around the main issues revolving around DRM technologies like CPRM and SDMI. He tries to portray them as separable from Free Software issues, when in reality, they are not.
The main purpose of Free Software is to place the power of the computer fully within the hands of the end user. With Free Software, the end user is capable of doing anything that can conceivably be done with the machine. DRM technologies work the other way around. They rely on manufacturers or closed source software developers to cripple the machine in ways that prohibit the end user from performing certain actions which the machine would otherwise be able to do.
I don't think you can reconcile these two approaches. You can not simultaneous provide the end user complete and total control over the hardware that he owns and still have digital rights management in place. There simply is no way for these two ideals to coexist peacefully since they are diametrically opposed to one another.
Good god almighty, y'all better beleive we got cell towers all over the friggin' place. Worse, because it's so flat in the Texas Panhandle, you can't go from one place to the other without actually being in visual range of a cell tower.
But that's actually just another example of how the cell size in Texas is so large.
In Japan, you never see the cell towers becuase they don't really tower very much. They're just little transcievers that sit on the tops of buildings, almost completely out of sight. You don't need to build massive towers because you're only transmitting very short distances.
Because a Texas tower is designed to serve an area many miles across, you need a big tower to do it.
The reason Japanese phones are smaller, lighter, and have longer battery life than American equivalents is because the cell size is much smaller.
Optimal cell size is a function of population density. In the Tokyo area, you've got about a billion people per square foot, so you can afford to keep the cell size small, which means you don't need a lot of power to transmit.
If you were to try to use the same cell size in a place like Texas, you'd be putting up more cell towers than there are people. It's just not economically feasable to do that.
Americans want phones they can take anywhere in the country and have them work. They need a big battery and a high power transmitter to make that work.
Here in the building where I work in Ibaraki-prefecture there's almost no cell coverage because we're a government lab (KEK) and you can't place a cell tower on government property according to Japanese law. People have to run to the roof whenever their cell phone rings. The lab isn't that big, either. It' can't me much more than a couple of square kilometers. Once you get off the lab, your phone works pretty much everywhere.
Don't expect to see Japan-sized phones in the U.S. any time soon. We need a ten-fold increase in population density before it will become practical.
A million yen is abit less than $10,000, if you're not up on your exchange rates.
$10K for over a year's work doesn't seem like such a good trade to me.
See also Revoking Corporate Charters.
There's a four part radio series called "Corporation, Corporation" that details the history of corporate law. A corporate death penalty is actually not a new thing. Prior to the twentieth century, corporate charters could, and frequently were, revoked if the company broke serious laws.
If you get a chance to hear the program, I really recommend it. I don't think there's a copy online anywhere, but it's for sale on tape at 100fires.