This is more of the same, "Infringe on someone else's freedom to protect mine? Sounds good! Infringe on my freedom to protect someone else's? Hell no!"
The cynic in me is saying that a lot of these allegedly inalienable, fundamental rights are only the compromises of various groups trying to take away each other's rights. Group A wants to censor group B and C, B wants to censor C and D, C wants to censor all of them and D wants to censor A and B. That they come together to make something like "freedom of speech" is just a mutual defense treaty against being censored themselves, not because they're fundamentally for it. That you have something like "due process", well that's not because the criminals deserve it or because you want to make it difficult to put them in jail. It's because you could be wrongly suspected to be a criminal, and you'd like your chance to prove it before you're dangling from a rope by a lynch mob like in the wild west.
You see it every time it's talk of singling out exceptions, these rights are for everyone except the people at Gitmo because the US population don't feel "this could be me". It's easy to support regimes of slavery and apartheid when you look at your skin and realize it's white, because those rules will never apply to you. There's a whole lot of people that will fight for their rights, it's pretty damn few who'd really like to fight for other people's rights. There's a poem by Arnulf Øverland here in Norway "Dare not to sleep" that's become rather popular. The most known lines are translated to English are:
Do not sit safely in your home and say: It is sad, poor them! You must not endure so incredibly well the injustice that does not affect yourself!
That was written in 1937 so you can guess what it's about, I guess this post has already Godwin'd itself.
Or it'll be like with Internet connections, remember pay per minute on those? Oh, I sure do. Remember caps and additional money/MB too? Oh yes. Turns out in general people don't like it. Most of us were willing to pay a good price simply to not have to worry about what next month's Internet bill would be. If I end up in the hospital a month and use zero bytes of bandwidth, I'm still going to pay the same. And that's the way I like it. I'm pretty sure that as the market matures cell phone data plans will get more sane too. Actually, checking now the ideal plan if you're a heavy data user in Norway: Netcom Fastpris Data, 249 NOK = 43 USD per month, free data usage, speed reduced to 120 kbps after 5GB. Regular subscriptions on the largest carriers are capped at 400-600 NOK or 70-100 USD so you can't go over that in a single month even if you are online 24x7.
Just don't use your smartphone abroad. Ever. Or if you must then enable, get your shit done and disable is ASAP. Might not be such a big deal in the US but imagine you had an inter-state charge that could be several dollars per megabyte. That's what it's like in Europe now, the moment you cross the border all rules change. They're supposed to block you after 500 NOK (85 USD) but sometimes they don't and it's your problem. Every so often you get news stories about them charging people thousands of dollars for that shit, total ripoff. Know where the off button is and use it. You'll enjoy your vacation more too, plus it does wonders for your battery life. You don't get to chit-chat with your phone though...
I guarantee that you do not own a Ferrari or an Aston Martin, Im willing to take a 3-to-1 wager that you do not own a BMW, Lexus or a Mercedes. Im willing to put even Money that you have a Ford, Toyota or a Honda.
I'd be willing to take on that last bet... how much are you worth?
1. There really is something weird about our dual-planet system (tides, etc) that makes life truly rare.
Possibly, or maybe it's converting from natural attributes to artificial attributes that is rare. I mean, it took billions of years from the first life until we came along and humans are not particularly strong or fast or have good claws or fangs to capture pray or defend ourselves, nor the natural ability to survive most of the climates we live in. We survived by making weapons, tools, housing and clothes, but just barely. We almost went extinct 70000 years ago with only a few thousand humans left alive - if that branch had died out how many millions of years could it have been to the next potential race? You can have some very intelligent animals as such, but they wouldn't be building radio telescopes or space rockets.
2. It really is impossible to go FTL
This one alone just isn't enough though. If you look at universal time frames then just the 65 million years since the dinosaurs went extinct should be enough to populate large parts of the galaxy, even if it takes thousands of years to travel between planets.
3. Intelligent life has a propensity to kill itself off.
Possibly, or maybe life already on the grid is waiting for new life to announce itself, not go polling Earth every year or even every century when it's been silent for billions of years. If we start finding habitable-ish exoplanets and start pinging them with high powered directed radio signals, then take 2x the distance in light years and wait for replies things could be different.
Fermi took one unknown and broke it up into lots of factors that are also unknown, as long as at one of those factors is completely unknown so of course is the product. But we're making progress on some of them, like the distribution of planets in the universe. And that was the point, just breaking it down into sub-problems that could be studied individually. It was never meant to solve anything as such, maybe doesn't it even have enough unknowns. But it's way you can work towards an answer at least.
This is the Steam model. Steam has a horde of dutiful fans who back them up; it's convenient for those who have super fast internet so they will defend the entire model of Steam just to keep that convenience. Some have even defended the DRM as only hurting places like GameStop or other sleazy resellers. But the owner's rights are being restricted and that should never be accepted just because of convenience. There are even worse places than Steam too with much more restrictive DRM (the Steam fans sometimes defend them as "it could be worse").
With all the due respect, think of Steam like WoW without the monthly fees. If WoW were to shut down tomorrow it's not an argument that OMG you've spent 10000 hours building a character and money on games and expansions and fees and DLCs and buying shit on eBay. Oh there would be massive outrage but there's nothing legally binding them to provide service except prepaid game time and even there they could issue a refund for the future days you lost and nothing else. You don't have any recourse if they change the game in ways you don't like either. People should think of Steam the same way, but just because they do doesn't mean they don't want it. Millions of people play WoW after all. A lot of people will be happy if they just feel they got their entertainment value out of it as long as they feel confident that Steam will remain operational for as long as they need to get that entertainment value. Pay today, get your money's worth over the next 6 months and if Steam is there in 10 years or not? Not important.
Yeah, that's stupid. They are both luxury items, especially when new. Or maybe you think the 75% of the world that doesn't own a car isn't getting by at all.
Does not own a car != does not have access to a car. A couple with children that share a car have as far as I consider it all a car, so you can multiply the 1 billion plus cars with a pretty big factor. I don't own a car but it's because I live in a fairly big city with good public transportation so I only exceptionally need one and I have family I can borrow from and several leasing/pooling options as well. That does not in any way mean I consider cars as a luxury. I consider it a basic transportation tool that I happen to not have any need for on a daily basis. I think it comes down to your meaning of luxury, yes people lived before refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers, microwaves, TV, radio, computers, cell phones and even electricity. Some people still do, but does that mean billions are living in luxury today?
Standards change, 20 years ago having a cell phone was a luxury. Today there's over 5 billion cell phone subscriptions (july 2010) and it's the standard of living for all but the poorest people on earth, and even they typically share one in some form. Cars have long ceased to be any form of luxury in any sense I'd care to define it. It has become the backbone of society that let people get around and if you don't have one because you can't afford one even though there's not any good alternatives then you are poor, not missing a luxury. Society adapts too, when so many drive to the store it becomes longer between shops. Workplaces place themselves in commuting distances, not walking distances. In many rural areas it's now difficult to function in society without a car, it might not strictly be a necessity but your quality of life will be greatly diminished without one.
What you're missing is that, without a used market for buyers of new games to recoup some of the cost of their unwanted games with, they simply won't buy as many new games.
No, but if they only want to pay $30 because they'd buy at $60 and sell at $30 after a year they will now buy when eventually the price is lowered to $30 because nobody will buy at $60 anymore. Or they can offer both a $60 buy and $30 1-year lease option on release day. There's no way they lose money by being able to totally price discriminate. In fact, they can manipulate the market by fixing it at certain price points without interference from second hand sales, enticing people to buy because the price won't go down anyway. And they can now perfectly discriminate between territories without any gray market or cross-territory second hand sales.
Where they also win is that they exclude all the people whose value change. Say you bought it at $60 and wasn't planning to sell it, so you're indifferent to whether it's a transferable or non-transferable license. Then you find out you didn't actually like the game or grew bored with it and would like to sell it for $10 then you can do that, before you could but now you can't. Instead they now get to sell a $10 game instead of your "unplanned" $10 sale. Of course an entirely rational mind would see this, but as long as you think the value is greater than the price at the time of purchase it is still rational to buy. It is only after you have more information that the game tree has been reduced to your disadvantage.
Someone was posting the other day (or even today?), it seems almost pathological that people seem to need the "latest" and "most modern". Do the extra features actually add much? I don't feel much gain from them.
Well, there's two significant reasons why I'd pick Win7 over WinXP.
1) SSD alignment, both for performance and lifetime, you can hack it into working on WinXP too but it's not good at it. 2) 64-bit so I can have 16GB of RAM. Now if you say PAE or XP 64-bit, I say try it.
So, if there is a warrant to search your hard drive to see if you recently visited websites on how to poison your wife, and they come to your house and find a body in your freezer, the body isn't admissible.
In theory, but warrants don't go down to the specific hard drive. Usually it would say something like all computer equipment and media, which implicitly gives the police the right to search any and all places you might have hidden said media. It doesn't matter that all your computer equipment was the laptop on the livingroom table, they still got the right to search every crevice big enough to hide an USB stick. If they happen to find your hidden drug stash or anything else in the process, it's fair game.
Not at all. But it's not enough that they merely offer you the opportunity to commit a crime. They can even be highly suggestive, like pretending to be a promiscuous young teenager. You would have to prove they applied pressure to provoke you into doing something out of character, not just because you lacked the opportunity. Say there's an undercop sitting there smoking a joint, if you accept it it's probably still not entrapment. If you refuse it and he keeps pressuring you into taking a whiff to be part of the gang and then slams the cuffs on you, then you can talk about entrapment. Most people that cry entrapment haven't been nearly as reluctant as the defense requires.
The problem is that it's like selling knives to people and the most common thing people do is stab each other with them. You can try keeping up appearances and say we're only selling a tool, but sooner or later someone on your staff is going to crack and say "Yes, our tool is used for stabbing. You know it, I know it, we all know it's the 800lb gorilla in the room we can't talk about." Even if you're legitimately trying to minimize the illegal potential, admitting that your awkward stabbing weapon still could be used for stabbing is an admission. And that you didn't sell an even duller knife even though it'd be useless as a knife too, you are still saying you didn't do everything you could to stop stabbers. In short, you can't talk about them. I guarantee that if you do, their lawyers will find more than enough rope to hang you with when things are taken out of context and interpreted in the most cynical way.
True, but it's the same as that door. If the police forces you to open that door, they can go in and, say, help someone getting murdered inside. They cannot, however, charge you with what they find.
You may want to check your local jurisdiction on that. Normally they can charge you for anything in plain view, but they can't search the place.
And most obvious weak spots, like say the US electricity grid, have proven near 100% impervious for a decade now.
How is that a huge weak spot? We had a big hurricane here in Norway some weeks back, many people lost power for quite some time. No big deal, and that was with far more massive damage than anything a few terrorists could manage. It's not terror having to use candles and flashlights. Even if the food in your fridge spoils and your cell phone runs out of battery you're not in mortal danger. The risk of quick and brutal death in a bombing works far better than trying to mass inconvenience people. Those who really need backups like hospitals and such have them, the rest of society will go on even if nobody gets anything done a day. Knocking out the power grid during an invasion, that's critical. Just knocking out the power grid? Not so much...
Besides, even in such a model you still need meet-me functionality. A "thepiratebay". Does Tor provide that ? I'm pretty sure that given a static target you can interact with, no location protection is possible.
Actually, yes it does and it's called onion sites. They're certainly not trivial to find, though I don't know how hard anyone has tried.
It is prohibitively expensive not to use direct routing once you get past a certain file size
But that "certain" file size is a moving target. Okay with my 60 Mbps fiber line I can get 5-6 MB/s over BitTorrent and maybe 1-200 kB/s with indirect routing, but it's still as fast as my 1 Mbps ADSL line was 10 years ago. True you won't be sharing BluRays that way - yet - but at full 24x7 download I'd probably manage to suck 30GB/month down that straw.
Of course, most other regions like Europe or China don't consider the self-incrimination thing to be a problem at all.
Don't smear all of Europe for the UKs RIP privacy act, the biggest lapdog of the US is the one that's gone furthest to absolish protections against self-incrimination. In most of Europe you can still tell the police to put a sock in it without any real harm, though you can expect the police to slam you with everything else they can find.
Whenever someone files a false DMCA claim they are guilty of perjury
No, it is only perjury if they lie about being the copyright holder of the work allegedly infringed. There are some rules of "bad faith" takedowns, but they are much weaker and you must prove the identification was not only incorrect, but made in bad faith. Good luck with that.
It's practically the same thing. If there was arbitrage in taking a company private, empty their pockets and sell it off again you'd have huge private equity funds doing just that. Any $1 they put in their war chest will raise their market cap by $1, all other things being equal.
Since in America we have trial by jury, if it goes to court it seems unlikely there will be able to find a jury willing to convict.
Ahhahahahhaaha... when you've got juries willing to convict people to $1.5-2 million in damages for sharing 24 files as a plain normal P2P user, then the Megaupload guys will be lucky to not see the death penalty.
Of course capitalism rarely take into the account the link between spending value and creating value. Imagine you have two workers making products/services A and B to each other for $10, both have a low-cost Chinese alternative for $2.
So Income - Expenses = 10-10 = 0 for both.
Now one of them decides to buy cheap from China, putting the other worker out of a job.
So he gets Income - Expenses = 10-2 = 8 While the other gets Income - Expenses = 0-10 = -10.
Now the other worker says I can't afford this, I have to cut expenses and buy cheap too, putting the first one out of a job too.
So now they both have Income - Expenses = 0-2 = -2.
Their spending is now optimal since they're both buying the lowest cost alternative, yet they're now both worse off, dependent on foreign products and have a long term value imbalance between them and China. And there's another thing, there's plenty trade theory to show that international trade increases total output, fair enough. But when the market lacks buyers and unemployment rises, what's the simplest thing the low-cost country can do? Learn to build more things. It gets more people employed and it increases exports, while it gets harder and harder for the high-cost country to find exports to deliver back. Because in the end you're dependent on your ability to create value too, not just spend it.
Just to extend on that last one about choices, the rest of the world so mostly goes along with the US because it's a huge and rich market, the GDP is bigger than the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), the UK and France put together. It's a tiny bit smaller than the EU but bigger than the whole Eurozone, that's the weight the US throws around when it's making trade agreements and pushing their IP laws on others. Other countries aren't stupid, if they are to pass laws that would make their companies and their citizens pay more than they get back from US companies and US citizens it's because they get access to US markets. Or just put the laws on the books and have a very relaxed attitude to enforcing them, which the Ayn Rand fans love too.
If the economic center of the planet should shift towards Asia - after all there's over 4 billion people living there so it's a wonder it's not the economic center - then access to US markets will be much less important. A country of "rich" people to sell high end items yes, but if a couple billion people can afford your low-cost item and they buy one each then the US is only 300 million of that. For the long run it could be more profitable for McDonald's to teach a billion Indians and Chinese to eat Big Macs. Then again bad example, since the Americans are eating them like they were a billion already...
Add to that, most modern GPUs also have a variety of coprocessors for things like H.264 decoding. These are quite often licensed as IP cores from a third party
Not coprocessors but third party ASICs, particularly for multimedia en/decoding and HDMI audio. That it may be third party IP is only half the problem though, as I understand it AMD's Unified Video Decoder (UVD) is their own yet it's still a paperweight under the open source drivers because of DRM issues. Same with HDMI audio, they're required to provide a Protected Audio Path in order to play BluRays and such. In fact it's also a risk when releasing shader information because part of the H.264 decoding process happens in shaders, at least on AMD and part of the reason the open source driver doesn't get to share more with the proprietary driver.
That said, there's extremely much that could be done without more information too. As I understand it all the shader information to implement OpenGL 4.2 and OpenCL for Evergreen and Northern Islands (AMD HD 5xxx and 6xxx series) is out there, but both Mesa and the drivers need huge amounts of work. The current version of Mesa only supports OpenGL 2.1 but Mesa 8 is supposed to bring OpenGL 3.0 support, OpenCL is still only in proof of concept stages. That should "only" take a hundred full time developers or so, not any more specs. Right now the few that have plenty just keeping up with the huge architecture changes between generations...
Well, you can rephrase the same argument I made relative to a reference point, I'd still argue that the new generation is pulling the Internet towards more free exchange of information than where it is today.
And that's what will happen to the internet, given time. If you doubt it, think about the Patriot Act. It would never fly in the 90s, even most conservatives of the time would find it baffling. I may be a bit too optimistic here, but I think there would be, at least, lots of marches and vocal oppositors. But once 9/11 happened and, in a nationwide panic, it became institutionalized, then the reference point moved. And now you don't see a lot of people trying to repeal it, because they're used to it. The frog has been slowly boiled.
I think you're very selectively choosing the data to fit your theory. If at any time during the Cold War communist supporters had staged and launched an attack on the leading centers of commerce and government killing 3000 people, you'd see something far, far worse than the Patriot Act. Possibly even a WWIII no matter if it was authorized by the Soviet Union or not, probably internment camps like the US hadn't seen since they put Japanese people in them during WWII and massive new government powers that'd make McCarthyism look like a footnote. The 90s were a period of extreme dominance where the US seemed to have no significant enemies, foreign or domestic. Yes, 9/11 did move the reference point far back towards the US having enemies that they must defend against and that fear may linger a bit even though it's more than a decade ago and Osama bin Laden is dead, but as a slippery slope argument that the US has now taken one big step backwards when it comes to civil liberties so now it is doomed to take all the other steps until it falls into a full blown totalitarian nightmare is a very weak argument.
Let's face it, the Internet has totally changed the picture of information exchange. We're now moving towards a system where we can mass duplicate and send staggering amounts of data over encrypted, untraceable communication lines that are totally immune to warrants. Pretty much every restriction there has been on speech, be it libel, slander, threats, pump&dump stock scams, copyright, kiddie porn, every balance struck between privacy and rule of law through use of warrants and wiretaps is cracking up. I think in the end it will come down to a showdown that either everything must be traced, recorded and tracked or none of it is. That we're either headed for information anarchy or totalitarianism and technology is imposing that we make a choice. Now I predicted this years ago (really, I did) and it hasn't come down to it yet, but I keep seeing there are skirmishes and battle lines being drawn. Take down MegaUpload, take down TPB (conjecture), force the masses into the deep undercurrents of the Internet and maybe it'll come.
No, they'd only take some and make examples out of them. You have to make them feel that no fish is too small to risk getting caught. I'm guessing a bigger reason they would not is that it's probably running on many compromised machines/botnets, so they'd have to investigate a lot for every conviction. On a completely off-topic but related note, that's where I think the police here in Norway is total fail. Often they go out and say there's no resources to prosecute shoplifting and petty theft. When you put a hard limit on it like that, of course those types of crime will explode. No, you practically can't do every case but you must always do some cases, you can't just deal from the top and say oh our budget ran out at thefts of $X dollars, anything below that is case closed.
Here's the problem with the "willful" argument in general. Either you can have a cloud in which your data is private, or the owners of the cloud can actively prevent the use of the cloud for hosting "infringing content".
No, you ignore the fact that others can make them aware of infringing materials. Among the complaints:
- They deduplicated the files but if a DMCA request came they only killed that link and reduced the refcount, even though they now knew that file hash was infringing. - Failing to remove infringing files they were noticed about, of 39 infringing files 36 remained there for months and years. - Supporting users on requests that made it obvious that they were using the site for piracy.
None of these ways required them to snoop on their users. However, the more important one is solicitation, if it's found they were soliciting pirate content then pretty much all their other defenses go out the window. The US supreme court was very clear (9-0) that the safe harbor does not apply then and to use a car analogy it doesn't matter how many legal things they found you used it for if you also used it as a getaway vehicle in a bank robbery.
Even if we never yield, a new generation of internet users will come that, if not supportive, is already used to the idea of internet control, so they will not be shocked enough to voice their concerns so loudly. That's how these things almost always go and how society gradually changes its most ingrained values, for better or for worse.
Or maybe it's a new generation that take those freedoms as natural and essential. I'm still in my early 30s and yet when I grew up, we didn't have Internet until in my teens. Up until 1990 Norway had a total of one TV station, unless you had a satellite dish or was close to the Swedish border. I didn't have a cell phone until my late teens and calling out of the country - anything an American would call long distance - was expensive as hell. Yes you might say it was the Computer Age when PCs became common but it was in no way the Information Age that came later. Even if the Internet is a little less wild west than it was in the beginning, there's some 50 years worth of people older than me that never expected there to be an Internet at all. And if we count the voting population then only about 15 years of younger voters. We're very far from reaching a balance so even if those who join now are less radical than before I strongly doubt the Internet population as a whole is growing more conservative. Quite the opposite.
Slashdot Mirror
This is more of the same, "Infringe on someone else's freedom to protect mine? Sounds good! Infringe on my freedom to protect someone else's? Hell no!"
The cynic in me is saying that a lot of these allegedly inalienable, fundamental rights are only the compromises of various groups trying to take away each other's rights. Group A wants to censor group B and C, B wants to censor C and D, C wants to censor all of them and D wants to censor A and B. That they come together to make something like "freedom of speech" is just a mutual defense treaty against being censored themselves, not because they're fundamentally for it. That you have something like "due process", well that's not because the criminals deserve it or because you want to make it difficult to put them in jail. It's because you could be wrongly suspected to be a criminal, and you'd like your chance to prove it before you're dangling from a rope by a lynch mob like in the wild west.
You see it every time it's talk of singling out exceptions, these rights are for everyone except the people at Gitmo because the US population don't feel "this could be me". It's easy to support regimes of slavery and apartheid when you look at your skin and realize it's white, because those rules will never apply to you. There's a whole lot of people that will fight for their rights, it's pretty damn few who'd really like to fight for other people's rights. There's a poem by Arnulf Øverland here in Norway "Dare not to sleep" that's become rather popular. The most known lines are translated to English are:
Do not sit safely in your home
and say: It is sad, poor them!
You must not endure so incredibly well
the injustice that does not affect yourself!
That was written in 1937 so you can guess what it's about, I guess this post has already Godwin'd itself.
Or it'll be like with Internet connections, remember pay per minute on those? Oh, I sure do. Remember caps and additional money/MB too? Oh yes. Turns out in general people don't like it. Most of us were willing to pay a good price simply to not have to worry about what next month's Internet bill would be. If I end up in the hospital a month and use zero bytes of bandwidth, I'm still going to pay the same. And that's the way I like it. I'm pretty sure that as the market matures cell phone data plans will get more sane too. Actually, checking now the ideal plan if you're a heavy data user in Norway: Netcom Fastpris Data, 249 NOK = 43 USD per month, free data usage, speed reduced to 120 kbps after 5GB. Regular subscriptions on the largest carriers are capped at 400-600 NOK or 70-100 USD so you can't go over that in a single month even if you are online 24x7.
Just don't use your smartphone abroad. Ever. Or if you must then enable, get your shit done and disable is ASAP. Might not be such a big deal in the US but imagine you had an inter-state charge that could be several dollars per megabyte. That's what it's like in Europe now, the moment you cross the border all rules change. They're supposed to block you after 500 NOK (85 USD) but sometimes they don't and it's your problem. Every so often you get news stories about them charging people thousands of dollars for that shit, total ripoff. Know where the off button is and use it. You'll enjoy your vacation more too, plus it does wonders for your battery life. You don't get to chit-chat with your phone though...
I don't own a car but (...)
I guarantee that you do not own a Ferrari or an Aston Martin, Im willing to take a 3-to-1 wager that you do not own a BMW, Lexus or a Mercedes. Im willing to put even Money that you have a Ford, Toyota or a Honda.
I'd be willing to take on that last bet... how much are you worth?
1. There really is something weird about our dual-planet system (tides, etc) that makes life truly rare.
Possibly, or maybe it's converting from natural attributes to artificial attributes that is rare. I mean, it took billions of years from the first life until we came along and humans are not particularly strong or fast or have good claws or fangs to capture pray or defend ourselves, nor the natural ability to survive most of the climates we live in. We survived by making weapons, tools, housing and clothes, but just barely. We almost went extinct 70000 years ago with only a few thousand humans left alive - if that branch had died out how many millions of years could it have been to the next potential race? You can have some very intelligent animals as such, but they wouldn't be building radio telescopes or space rockets.
2. It really is impossible to go FTL
This one alone just isn't enough though. If you look at universal time frames then just the 65 million years since the dinosaurs went extinct should be enough to populate large parts of the galaxy, even if it takes thousands of years to travel between planets.
3. Intelligent life has a propensity to kill itself off.
Possibly, or maybe life already on the grid is waiting for new life to announce itself, not go polling Earth every year or even every century when it's been silent for billions of years. If we start finding habitable-ish exoplanets and start pinging them with high powered directed radio signals, then take 2x the distance in light years and wait for replies things could be different.
Fermi took one unknown and broke it up into lots of factors that are also unknown, as long as at one of those factors is completely unknown so of course is the product. But we're making progress on some of them, like the distribution of planets in the universe. And that was the point, just breaking it down into sub-problems that could be studied individually. It was never meant to solve anything as such, maybe doesn't it even have enough unknowns. But it's way you can work towards an answer at least.
This is the Steam model. Steam has a horde of dutiful fans who back them up; it's convenient for those who have super fast internet so they will defend the entire model of Steam just to keep that convenience. Some have even defended the DRM as only hurting places like GameStop or other sleazy resellers. But the owner's rights are being restricted and that should never be accepted just because of convenience. There are even worse places than Steam too with much more restrictive DRM (the Steam fans sometimes defend them as "it could be worse").
With all the due respect, think of Steam like WoW without the monthly fees. If WoW were to shut down tomorrow it's not an argument that OMG you've spent 10000 hours building a character and money on games and expansions and fees and DLCs and buying shit on eBay. Oh there would be massive outrage but there's nothing legally binding them to provide service except prepaid game time and even there they could issue a refund for the future days you lost and nothing else. You don't have any recourse if they change the game in ways you don't like either. People should think of Steam the same way, but just because they do doesn't mean they don't want it. Millions of people play WoW after all. A lot of people will be happy if they just feel they got their entertainment value out of it as long as they feel confident that Steam will remain operational for as long as they need to get that entertainment value. Pay today, get your money's worth over the next 6 months and if Steam is there in 10 years or not? Not important.
Yeah, that's stupid. They are both luxury items, especially when new. Or maybe you think the 75% of the world that doesn't own a car isn't getting by at all.
Does not own a car != does not have access to a car. A couple with children that share a car have as far as I consider it all a car, so you can multiply the 1 billion plus cars with a pretty big factor. I don't own a car but it's because I live in a fairly big city with good public transportation so I only exceptionally need one and I have family I can borrow from and several leasing/pooling options as well. That does not in any way mean I consider cars as a luxury. I consider it a basic transportation tool that I happen to not have any need for on a daily basis. I think it comes down to your meaning of luxury, yes people lived before refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers, microwaves, TV, radio, computers, cell phones and even electricity. Some people still do, but does that mean billions are living in luxury today?
Standards change, 20 years ago having a cell phone was a luxury. Today there's over 5 billion cell phone subscriptions (july 2010) and it's the standard of living for all but the poorest people on earth, and even they typically share one in some form. Cars have long ceased to be any form of luxury in any sense I'd care to define it. It has become the backbone of society that let people get around and if you don't have one because you can't afford one even though there's not any good alternatives then you are poor, not missing a luxury. Society adapts too, when so many drive to the store it becomes longer between shops. Workplaces place themselves in commuting distances, not walking distances. In many rural areas it's now difficult to function in society without a car, it might not strictly be a necessity but your quality of life will be greatly diminished without one.
What you're missing is that, without a used market for buyers of new games to recoup some of the cost of their unwanted games with, they simply won't buy as many new games.
No, but if they only want to pay $30 because they'd buy at $60 and sell at $30 after a year they will now buy when eventually the price is lowered to $30 because nobody will buy at $60 anymore. Or they can offer both a $60 buy and $30 1-year lease option on release day. There's no way they lose money by being able to totally price discriminate. In fact, they can manipulate the market by fixing it at certain price points without interference from second hand sales, enticing people to buy because the price won't go down anyway. And they can now perfectly discriminate between territories without any gray market or cross-territory second hand sales.
Where they also win is that they exclude all the people whose value change. Say you bought it at $60 and wasn't planning to sell it, so you're indifferent to whether it's a transferable or non-transferable license. Then you find out you didn't actually like the game or grew bored with it and would like to sell it for $10 then you can do that, before you could but now you can't. Instead they now get to sell a $10 game instead of your "unplanned" $10 sale. Of course an entirely rational mind would see this, but as long as you think the value is greater than the price at the time of purchase it is still rational to buy. It is only after you have more information that the game tree has been reduced to your disadvantage.
Someone was posting the other day (or even today?), it seems almost pathological that people seem to need the "latest" and "most modern". Do the extra features actually add much? I don't feel much gain from them.
Well, there's two significant reasons why I'd pick Win7 over WinXP.
1) SSD alignment, both for performance and lifetime, you can hack it into working on WinXP too but it's not good at it.
2) 64-bit so I can have 16GB of RAM. Now if you say PAE or XP 64-bit, I say try it.
When it comes to UI, I really can't say I care... everything since win2k is good enough for me, yes I've tried Linux and Macs but there's nothing about the ability to organize applications that gets me excited. I can do it with virtual desktops or exposé (too fancy for slashdot) or a plain old win2k style taskbar and alt-tab. It works, if you're annoyed about it you're not spending nearly enough time in the apps themselves.
So, if there is a warrant to search your hard drive to see if you recently visited websites on how to poison your wife, and they come to your house and find a body in your freezer, the body isn't admissible.
In theory, but warrants don't go down to the specific hard drive. Usually it would say something like all computer equipment and media, which implicitly gives the police the right to search any and all places you might have hidden said media. It doesn't matter that all your computer equipment was the laptop on the livingroom table, they still got the right to search every crevice big enough to hide an USB stick. If they happen to find your hidden drug stash or anything else in the process, it's fair game.
Not at all. But it's not enough that they merely offer you the opportunity to commit a crime. They can even be highly suggestive, like pretending to be a promiscuous young teenager. You would have to prove they applied pressure to provoke you into doing something out of character, not just because you lacked the opportunity. Say there's an undercop sitting there smoking a joint, if you accept it it's probably still not entrapment. If you refuse it and he keeps pressuring you into taking a whiff to be part of the gang and then slams the cuffs on you, then you can talk about entrapment. Most people that cry entrapment haven't been nearly as reluctant as the defense requires.
The problem is that it's like selling knives to people and the most common thing people do is stab each other with them. You can try keeping up appearances and say we're only selling a tool, but sooner or later someone on your staff is going to crack and say "Yes, our tool is used for stabbing. You know it, I know it, we all know it's the 800lb gorilla in the room we can't talk about." Even if you're legitimately trying to minimize the illegal potential, admitting that your awkward stabbing weapon still could be used for stabbing is an admission. And that you didn't sell an even duller knife even though it'd be useless as a knife too, you are still saying you didn't do everything you could to stop stabbers. In short, you can't talk about them. I guarantee that if you do, their lawyers will find more than enough rope to hang you with when things are taken out of context and interpreted in the most cynical way.
True, but it's the same as that door. If the police forces you to open that door, they can go in and, say, help someone getting murdered inside. They cannot, however, charge you with what they find.
You may want to check your local jurisdiction on that. Normally they can charge you for anything in plain view, but they can't search the place.
And most obvious weak spots, like say the US electricity grid, have proven near 100% impervious for a decade now.
How is that a huge weak spot? We had a big hurricane here in Norway some weeks back, many people lost power for quite some time. No big deal, and that was with far more massive damage than anything a few terrorists could manage. It's not terror having to use candles and flashlights. Even if the food in your fridge spoils and your cell phone runs out of battery you're not in mortal danger. The risk of quick and brutal death in a bombing works far better than trying to mass inconvenience people. Those who really need backups like hospitals and such have them, the rest of society will go on even if nobody gets anything done a day. Knocking out the power grid during an invasion, that's critical. Just knocking out the power grid? Not so much...
Besides, even in such a model you still need meet-me functionality. A "thepiratebay". Does Tor provide that ? I'm pretty sure that given a static target you can interact with, no location protection is possible.
Actually, yes it does and it's called onion sites. They're certainly not trivial to find, though I don't know how hard anyone has tried.
It is prohibitively expensive not to use direct routing once you get past a certain file size
But that "certain" file size is a moving target. Okay with my 60 Mbps fiber line I can get 5-6 MB/s over BitTorrent and maybe 1-200 kB/s with indirect routing, but it's still as fast as my 1 Mbps ADSL line was 10 years ago. True you won't be sharing BluRays that way - yet - but at full 24x7 download I'd probably manage to suck 30GB/month down that straw.
Of course, most other regions like Europe or China don't consider the self-incrimination thing to be a problem at all.
Don't smear all of Europe for the UKs RIP privacy act, the biggest lapdog of the US is the one that's gone furthest to absolish protections against self-incrimination. In most of Europe you can still tell the police to put a sock in it without any real harm, though you can expect the police to slam you with everything else they can find.
Whenever someone files a false DMCA claim they are guilty of perjury
No, it is only perjury if they lie about being the copyright holder of the work allegedly infringed. There are some rules of "bad faith" takedowns, but they are much weaker and you must prove the identification was not only incorrect, but made in bad faith. Good luck with that.
It's practically the same thing. If there was arbitrage in taking a company private, empty their pockets and sell it off again you'd have huge private equity funds doing just that. Any $1 they put in their war chest will raise their market cap by $1, all other things being equal.
Since in America we have trial by jury, if it goes to court it seems unlikely there will be able to find a jury willing to convict.
Ahhahahahhaaha... when you've got juries willing to convict people to $1.5-2 million in damages for sharing 24 files as a plain normal P2P user, then the Megaupload guys will be lucky to not see the death penalty.
Of course capitalism rarely take into the account the link between spending value and creating value. Imagine you have two workers making products/services A and B to each other for $10, both have a low-cost Chinese alternative for $2.
So Income - Expenses = 10-10 = 0 for both.
Now one of them decides to buy cheap from China, putting the other worker out of a job.
So he gets Income - Expenses = 10-2 = 8
While the other gets Income - Expenses = 0-10 = -10.
Now the other worker says I can't afford this, I have to cut expenses and buy cheap too, putting the first one out of a job too.
So now they both have Income - Expenses = 0-2 = -2.
Their spending is now optimal since they're both buying the lowest cost alternative, yet they're now both worse off, dependent on foreign products and have a long term value imbalance between them and China. And there's another thing, there's plenty trade theory to show that international trade increases total output, fair enough. But when the market lacks buyers and unemployment rises, what's the simplest thing the low-cost country can do? Learn to build more things. It gets more people employed and it increases exports, while it gets harder and harder for the high-cost country to find exports to deliver back. Because in the end you're dependent on your ability to create value too, not just spend it.
Just to extend on that last one about choices, the rest of the world so mostly goes along with the US because it's a huge and rich market, the GDP is bigger than the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), the UK and France put together. It's a tiny bit smaller than the EU but bigger than the whole Eurozone, that's the weight the US throws around when it's making trade agreements and pushing their IP laws on others. Other countries aren't stupid, if they are to pass laws that would make their companies and their citizens pay more than they get back from US companies and US citizens it's because they get access to US markets. Or just put the laws on the books and have a very relaxed attitude to enforcing them, which the Ayn Rand fans love too.
If the economic center of the planet should shift towards Asia - after all there's over 4 billion people living there so it's a wonder it's not the economic center - then access to US markets will be much less important. A country of "rich" people to sell high end items yes, but if a couple billion people can afford your low-cost item and they buy one each then the US is only 300 million of that. For the long run it could be more profitable for McDonald's to teach a billion Indians and Chinese to eat Big Macs. Then again bad example, since the Americans are eating them like they were a billion already...
Add to that, most modern GPUs also have a variety of coprocessors for things like H.264 decoding. These are quite often licensed as IP cores from a third party
Not coprocessors but third party ASICs, particularly for multimedia en/decoding and HDMI audio. That it may be third party IP is only half the problem though, as I understand it AMD's Unified Video Decoder (UVD) is their own yet it's still a paperweight under the open source drivers because of DRM issues. Same with HDMI audio, they're required to provide a Protected Audio Path in order to play BluRays and such. In fact it's also a risk when releasing shader information because part of the H.264 decoding process happens in shaders, at least on AMD and part of the reason the open source driver doesn't get to share more with the proprietary driver.
That said, there's extremely much that could be done without more information too. As I understand it all the shader information to implement OpenGL 4.2 and OpenCL for Evergreen and Northern Islands (AMD HD 5xxx and 6xxx series) is out there, but both Mesa and the drivers need huge amounts of work. The current version of Mesa only supports OpenGL 2.1 but Mesa 8 is supposed to bring OpenGL 3.0 support, OpenCL is still only in proof of concept stages. That should "only" take a hundred full time developers or so, not any more specs. Right now the few that have plenty just keeping up with the huge architecture changes between generations...
Well, you can rephrase the same argument I made relative to a reference point, I'd still argue that the new generation is pulling the Internet towards more free exchange of information than where it is today.
And that's what will happen to the internet, given time. If you doubt it, think about the Patriot Act. It would never fly in the 90s, even most conservatives of the time would find it baffling. I may be a bit too optimistic here, but I think there would be, at least, lots of marches and vocal oppositors. But once 9/11 happened and, in a nationwide panic, it became institutionalized, then the reference point moved. And now you don't see a lot of people trying to repeal it, because they're used to it. The frog has been slowly boiled.
I think you're very selectively choosing the data to fit your theory. If at any time during the Cold War communist supporters had staged and launched an attack on the leading centers of commerce and government killing 3000 people, you'd see something far, far worse than the Patriot Act. Possibly even a WWIII no matter if it was authorized by the Soviet Union or not, probably internment camps like the US hadn't seen since they put Japanese people in them during WWII and massive new government powers that'd make McCarthyism look like a footnote. The 90s were a period of extreme dominance where the US seemed to have no significant enemies, foreign or domestic. Yes, 9/11 did move the reference point far back towards the US having enemies that they must defend against and that fear may linger a bit even though it's more than a decade ago and Osama bin Laden is dead, but as a slippery slope argument that the US has now taken one big step backwards when it comes to civil liberties so now it is doomed to take all the other steps until it falls into a full blown totalitarian nightmare is a very weak argument.
Let's face it, the Internet has totally changed the picture of information exchange. We're now moving towards a system where we can mass duplicate and send staggering amounts of data over encrypted, untraceable communication lines that are totally immune to warrants. Pretty much every restriction there has been on speech, be it libel, slander, threats, pump&dump stock scams, copyright, kiddie porn, every balance struck between privacy and rule of law through use of warrants and wiretaps is cracking up. I think in the end it will come down to a showdown that either everything must be traced, recorded and tracked or none of it is. That we're either headed for information anarchy or totalitarianism and technology is imposing that we make a choice. Now I predicted this years ago (really, I did) and it hasn't come down to it yet, but I keep seeing there are skirmishes and battle lines being drawn. Take down MegaUpload, take down TPB (conjecture), force the masses into the deep undercurrents of the Internet and maybe it'll come.
No, they'd only take some and make examples out of them. You have to make them feel that no fish is too small to risk getting caught. I'm guessing a bigger reason they would not is that it's probably running on many compromised machines/botnets, so they'd have to investigate a lot for every conviction. On a completely off-topic but related note, that's where I think the police here in Norway is total fail. Often they go out and say there's no resources to prosecute shoplifting and petty theft. When you put a hard limit on it like that, of course those types of crime will explode. No, you practically can't do every case but you must always do some cases, you can't just deal from the top and say oh our budget ran out at thefts of $X dollars, anything below that is case closed.
Here's the problem with the "willful" argument in general. Either you can have a cloud in which your data is private, or the owners of the cloud can actively prevent the use of the cloud for hosting "infringing content".
No, you ignore the fact that others can make them aware of infringing materials. Among the complaints:
- They deduplicated the files but if a DMCA request came they only killed that link and reduced the refcount, even though they now knew that file hash was infringing.
- Failing to remove infringing files they were noticed about, of 39 infringing files 36 remained there for months and years.
- Supporting users on requests that made it obvious that they were using the site for piracy.
None of these ways required them to snoop on their users. However, the more important one is solicitation, if it's found they were soliciting pirate content then pretty much all their other defenses go out the window. The US supreme court was very clear (9-0) that the safe harbor does not apply then and to use a car analogy it doesn't matter how many legal things they found you used it for if you also used it as a getaway vehicle in a bank robbery.
Even if we never yield, a new generation of internet users will come that, if not supportive, is already used to the idea of internet control, so they will not be shocked enough to voice their concerns so loudly. That's how these things almost always go and how society gradually changes its most ingrained values, for better or for worse.
Or maybe it's a new generation that take those freedoms as natural and essential. I'm still in my early 30s and yet when I grew up, we didn't have Internet until in my teens. Up until 1990 Norway had a total of one TV station, unless you had a satellite dish or was close to the Swedish border. I didn't have a cell phone until my late teens and calling out of the country - anything an American would call long distance - was expensive as hell. Yes you might say it was the Computer Age when PCs became common but it was in no way the Information Age that came later. Even if the Internet is a little less wild west than it was in the beginning, there's some 50 years worth of people older than me that never expected there to be an Internet at all. And if we count the voting population then only about 15 years of younger voters. We're very far from reaching a balance so even if those who join now are less radical than before I strongly doubt the Internet population as a whole is growing more conservative. Quite the opposite.