Wow, talk about a false dichotomy. Nobody here in Norway will publish my name if I get arrested (except in some few exceptional circumstances) but there's nothing like a secret arrest. I can still contact the media, or have my lawyer contact the media. I can waiver the confidentiality requirements of the police. This is the same as if e.g. I wanted to run a story on my medical condition, they could interview my doctor if I waiver the confidentiality on my journal. A secret arrest would imply the police could prevent me from telling anyone that I am arrested, or to not acknowledge that I've been arrested.
Hell, around here I can't even get a copy of my criminal record without reason. Employers in general can't ask for one, and even when they're legally required to then only for relevant crimes. So for example I might have to get one to become a school teacher, but it'll say nothing about any tax dodging. Only if I have committed crimes against children that'd make me unfit to be a teacher. Only applying for the police or security clearance in the military will bring out your full record. You make it sound like we'd be some Kafka-esque country with secret trails and all that but we're not. There's more choices than that and public scapegoating the way the US does.
True, but the degree of care is much, much lower. At the last count, my home server could hold the whole print collection of the Library of Congress (10TB). That's pretty much every brain splurge anyone got published as the deposit requirements hit pretty fast. In compressed form, the entire English wikipedia is ~6 GB or less than 1/1000th of that. At that point nobody has to really care about the one text, just if anybody is interested enough to keep the archive alive.
Spotify carries 8 million tracks, if we say 5MB/track then that's 40TB. Okay, my server couldn't handle that alone but it'd be no problem for someone who's a fan of rock to have every rock song ever. I think you have to seriously consider the possibility that in the future, we'll have more storage space than the effort it takes to produce something worthwhile to fill it with. And by that I mean every book, photo, song and video consciously made, even all the notorious home videos. Just not every CCTV recording "nothing" 24/7.
After all, even if you gave me near infinite capability to record my own life, I'd have rather limited interest in running around with a photo or video camera all the time, or do band practice or write books. My production tops out, while the true limits of our storage capability are still unknown. Hell, if we got rid of copyright so we could trivially pool all our storage of public media then most people's storage capacity would already be excessive today. I haven't got 10TB of self-produced stuff and never imagine I will.
P.S. I got fed up with Intel when I found out I'd have to throw out my motherboard, CPU and RAM to move from a Core2 Quad to *any* of the i3/5/7 offerings. My motherboard, CPU and RAM were no more than two years old and yet somehow there was no financially sane upgrade path for ANY of the components.
True. But is there one particular component there you really feel needs upgrading? More RAM you probably could add unless you're already maxed, motherboards haven't changed much. I suppose there's the new hex-core processors but the difference between a Core2 quad and i7 quad aren't enough to justify the CPU price I'd say. Or are you just on a two year upgrade cycle out of habit? I'd say that's way too early, then you underbought on your original purchase.
Yes, you can put a AMD hex-core on your old AM2 board that used to house a dual core, but what's the memory penalty going to be like? I haven't seen a single benchmark site that's bothered to test the combination, that it works doesn't always equate to making sense. Over the years I have made exactly one CPU upgrade, from a Duron 700 to Athlon 1200. I suppose if I hadn't switched from AMD to an Intel Q6600 (because AMD had no quad offering at the time) there could be a second time, but... In most cases, by the time performance sucked so bad I wanted to upgrade too much had changed.
You know, a lot of us were saying that it is unfortunate that there is a market for the iPad, since it is so restrictive and designed to undermine its users' freedoms. If Apple ventures into TV, we will probably wind up saying the same thing, unless Apple decides to do an about-face (I won't hold my breath).
I hope it'd work our kinda like music DRM, movies too are run by a few big studios.
1. There is no online distribution (movies are now here) 2. Apple makes it popular to get it online, but making it an iDevice-only solution 3. Apple gets too much market power over studios, to break free and offer alternatives they must drop DRM (music is now here)
Sometimes I honestly think that if Apple hadn't gotten it started, we still couldn't buy music any other way than a CD...
Wait now, didn't we agree there was no such thing as a market for an iPad? And now we're suddenly discussing what knock-offs will compete for a slice of the profits?
The latter is quite simple, none of the other really get out of the Catch 22. Users don't buy until there's apps and app developers don't develop until there's a market. Unless you're Steve Jobs and provably have millions of followers, then you hit critical hype and get a sufficient quantity of apps and users out there simultaneously to set the snowball rolling. Exhibit A, the iPhone. Out of the box quite satisfactory but nothing special compared to HTC and the other smart phones. But hell, given all the useful and funny and clever (and gimmicky and useless) apps Ive seen for it, even I want one by now. Not because I think Apple is that great, but because that's where the applications are.
I think next they'll make the home entertainment center common - oh they've been around forever with Windows Media Center and such but so had the Windows tablets. I don't really count the AppleTV as one either, it's more of a warmup. Not as a console replacement, but one taking a big chunk out of the "casual" gaming market Nintendo has shown is there with the Wii too. And really bringing that together has the core in your system setup, not a Mac. And possibly finally bring around the TV revolution where more people get series and movies via iTunes over the Internet than over broadcasts and cable. Well, the legal revolution anyway;).
I'm used to most movies and shows I like being in HD, I certainly notice how fuzzy SD suddenly looks. I find the same with video games, over many years the "state of the art" always looked great despite how much it sucked in retrospect. Nothing saves a bad movie, but there are stuff I wish was produced in much better quality and with better effects. Then again, I'm happy it was made rather than not at all under any circumstances. It just deserved more... persistance, not something you'll so easily say "OMG was that made in the 80s?" - at least those stories not actually set in the 80s...
It's not nearly as important, because most Windows software ship with all their dependencies as well. While 64 bit linux can run 32 bit software, then you need all the libraries to be compiled as 32 bit as well because otherwise pointer sizes would differ. Unless the application uses more than 4GB of RAM, all you miss is a few percent performance.
The same thing needs to be done for internet access (only the kinds provided by a physical wire/fiber, however).
Actually, you don't need to get that drastic. Just regulate and make compulsory the lease of the last mile, so competitors only need lay down central-central fiber. Trying to regulate the entire ISP industry is a much harder and more fast-moving target, power and water are well defined services but broadband is not. You could easily end up killing the incentives to move to better technology because the profits from it will be regulated out of it. Freeing the last mile on the other hand leads to healthy competition.
1. Buy a Asus EEE 1001PX 2. Install Ubuntu 10.04 3. Play something on the speaker, that'll work 4. Insert headphones. The speakers will mute but no sound. And yes, I did check that the volume wasn't muted and all that.
That and wireless didn't work until I did a manual kernel update via cable. Sigh. I heard upgrading to 2.6.34 would break the webcam though, but maybe that's been fixed - I haven't checked. And it's still unstable if the wireless will come back after a suspend, sometimes there's no signal at all afterwards.
I use it on my desktop, and my parents do because I fix any stupid shit, but I'm still not recommending it to anyone else without strong geek-fu.
Yeah, because that'd so improve Linux' image as the OS for basement dweller nerds who can't get laid. And even for those of us who don't mind porn, playing on sex to sell something is so overdone, cheap and lame. It's got nothing to do with the product but let's throw a half-naked lady in our ad, go buy. I'm not sure there's actually that much good porn which is legally distributable, it's just that copyright seems to mean even less for porn than everything else.
What OSS lack is killer apps, and I don't mean Firefox or OpenOffice or GIMP. They're decent contenders but they're not huge hits. I don't care how many times KDE reinvents the semantic desktop and new ways to give me notifications, it's the applications that count. The other part is not being so militantly hostile to closed source, it's choice. Nothing will force you to buy Photoshop for Linux if GIMP makes you happy. For example right now I wish there was a decent video editor for Linux, of any kind. I've tried what's allegedly the best and well.. I'd be willing to pay money for something better.
If I write a book and you take it and pretend that it's yours, most people would call that stealing. You're trying to take something away from me, the right to be recognized as the author. Having my personal information spread around doesn't make it identity theft, but trying to impersonate me does because only I should be recognized as myself. Though when it comes to immaterial things, fraud is probably the better word. However, identity fraud sounds like you are the one being defrauded, you're not. You're just the person whose identity was used.
Just because it complies with some formal coding styles and formatting doesn't say anything about the actual content and sanity of the structure. Very many systems seem to get do-overs on a regular basis.
Thanks, but I know plenty. To get rid of AACS all you need is the MKB derived from the player key, but open source doesn't have that either. The other part of most BluRay disc protection is BD+ which works pretty much like I said. And now they're just starting to top it off with Cinavia too, an audio watermark that'll prevent decrypted copies from playing on hardware players. If you have a decrypted copy of The Losers (Region A) and a fully updated PS3, the sound will die after 20 minutes and a nasty message will tell you it's not licensed. Pretty soon you have to reencode to have the damn thing play or use a HTPC and an unlicensed player.
Its not like people have stopped breaking these codecs. Eventually they will be broken. All of them. (...) They are doing it for the joy of cracking a puzzle. (...) The economics of constantly updating the rom in players can't match the cracking joy the kids get breaking into them.
You really don't get how modern DRM works, do you? They don't have to constantly update the ROM, they just reveal the functionality bit by bit with new discs and so there's an endless war to reverse engineer and update the decryption software. It's a war of attrition and they're winning, it's more puzzles than people are willing to work on just for shits and giggles. It literally takes manyears of dedicated work to continuously update the tool and open source is lagging more and more behind, not closing up.
So anyone who produces IP, instead of things that can be exported, represents a net loss of wealth to the country - they take money *only* from other Americans, while spending that money all over the world.
What does the US economy more good - buying a movie made by Americans or buying cheap imports from China? Reducing imports by producing something valuable domestically is just as important as increasing exports if you want to reach a trade balance. There's plenty of rich left in the US, but pretty much the whole meat of the economy has been moved to China so there's nothing produced in the US worth buying and so the unemployment stays at 10%. Killing a "local" industry, even if it doesn't contribute to export only makes the situation worse.
The real problem is that the US has a fairytale economy driven only by consumption and retail. Everything done to kick start the economy is about getting people to spend more money they don't have, because it creates the illusion of stability and recovery when the problem runs much deeper. The real problem is that retail outlets are worth very little to anyone else, they only have value as long as they serve people with money. And even those people still with a job should take note and realize they need a nest egg for a long and ugly unemployment, I find the consumer confidence astoundingly high given the circumstances. But then nobody saw the credit crunch coming to slap them silly either, so I guess they won't see the structural crisis either...
Or Europe, after the EUCD. And it won't be most other places either, after ACTA. But over time you realize the law isn't a perfect democratic tool but often run by special interest groups, and how little the law means if sufficiently many disagree with it.
If they had the power to take down BluRay decrypters, they'd be going after the commercial tools that actually work. This is roughly the umpteenth open source library announced and what they all have in common is that they don't work on any of the newer movies with MKBv11 or higher and/or anything more than the simplest forms of BD+ protection. It's unlikely open source will catch up until the MPAA gives up the DRM fight, you may not see it but there's still a constant war of updates to make the decrypters work on new discs.
there is pretty much a presumption of guilt now for any such accusation, even if it's in the midst of a nasty divorce/custody case or if the victim has a clear financial gain in making an accusation.
I think the point is that divorce and custody cases must be settled, you can't go back to where you were. That false accusations happen in nasty divorce/custody cases is mixed with many real events leading to nasty divorce/custody cases, the timing doesn't make it less credible. Imagine that you're a parent that suspects your child has been abused somehow, but you can't get any clear answers on what or who and no hard evidence only sensing abrupt changes in behavior, or even if you do they're so unclear and inconsistent you don't think they'll hold up in criminal court. Fortunately parents don't need that and can act if they think their child has possibly or probably been abused. As damn well they should.
In the marriage you can become a guardian hawk looking after your children all the time, but after a divorce you can't. You'll have to fully hand over custody of the children part of the time, even if it's just for a weekend. Would you let them go without a fight, even if you knew you don't have proof? Hell no. You'd make desperate accusations in the hope that somehow they'll stick, and if they don't at least you did everything possible to let people know. Trying to prosecute "groundless accusations" harder would quite often lead to other miscarriages of justice, unfortunately it's pretty hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it didn't happen too. But you have to deal with all the situations that lie in the middle somehow.
Imagine you knew as a fact that the parent in front of you is with 50% probability abusive. If you had ten such cases, what would you pick? Five cases of children being wrongfully taken from their parents or five children sent to homes you had good reason to suspect was abusive? After all 50% is massively higher than your average home, and even if CPS are alerted they have the same dilemma of pestering innocents versus uncovering disguised abuse. Victims have after all often been manipulated or threatened into silence and don't openly admit to being abused. Would is matter if it was 80%? 20%? 1%? Somewhere we draw the line, and there's no good pretending that we should have some divine insight and always know and not talk of probabilities. Some of these cases we will get wrong, it's only a question of what wrongs matter more.
Imagine you took two solved cubes and twisted the top third of one and the bottom third of the other. The path to a solution has length 1 but getting from one to the other has length 2, so it's not automatically equivalent. However, specifically for the full Rubrik's cube you may be correct. If we take the arbitrary end position, take off all the stickers and reattach them as a solved cube, then there must be a solution from the solved cube to the starting position. So using the same moves we should be able to get between any arbitrary configuration in 20 moves. But of course you already understood that and I just had to spell out the details;)
Yes, and cosmological timescales are so much larger than ours. If we wait another 10000 years then it'll go from 65.50 to 65.51 million years since the dinosaurs went extinct. There's nothing here that needs doing now or in the next ten or hundred or even thousand years. We could easily have spent another million years on the monkey stage, there's no reason to think we need to get off this rock the same cosmological millisecond we figure out how. We're much better off figuring how to head off killer asteroids and hope 12000 km of earth means someone will survive on the back side if we're hit by a massive gamma blast. And if shit happens in our solar system then the whole system may be FUBAR, it's not really until we have a habitable exoplanet that we have a real backup to earth.
Micropayments would go nowhere, there'd be too many ways to be an asshat racking up charges for innocent people by having trojans send spam, bombing sign-up forms with email lists and so on, never mind the money would go have to go somewhere so the ISP collecting it would run their own profit racket. There'd be charge disputes and the whole nine yards.
The real issue is that email was never designed with any standard way of separating solicited and unsolicited mail, creating and disposing of temporary or single-purpose addresses or anything like that. It was all one big open directory like a phone book and one big inbox for recieving all your mail. IMs have fared much better than e-mail when it comes to avoiding spam and the same has Facebook, both without micropayments. It's just that for email you can't get away from that lowest common denominator of accepting pretty much all mail that has you in the "To:" field.
Why is it always assumed that people who spend $2500 on a computer have an unlimited amount of money?
It means they obviously had the cash to get a slightly less pimped computer and leave something for their game budget. The only way you end up with $0 left over is if you thought games are free anyway. That finding $60 in your budget is an inconvienience to you is a very poor excuse. And if you don't got the cash, why isn't settling for free or bargain bin games you can afford good enough? If you can't afford to buy a brand new car you might have to settle for a 10 year old one. I am in favor of abolishing copyright, but don't pretend it would be so horrible if software worked like the real world - if you can't afford it, suck it up, find the money or go without. The mindset that you can have anything you feel like whether you can afford it or not is exactly what brought on the credit crunch, only with copyright infringement it doesn't come back to bite you in the ass later.
I'd argue that computers in pre-GUI times had a much lower learning curve to get to the point of programming.
And the bar for what was considered "professional" programming was much lower. I remember programming my C64, and I could do the same kind of blocky sprites and beep-beep music that almost kinda looked like a game someone would sell. It was at least "in range", so to speak. Whereas today most games are a huge team effort with high quality art, music etc., neither a one man garage developer nor one kid in front of a computer.
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Wow, talk about a false dichotomy. Nobody here in Norway will publish my name if I get arrested (except in some few exceptional circumstances) but there's nothing like a secret arrest. I can still contact the media, or have my lawyer contact the media. I can waiver the confidentiality requirements of the police. This is the same as if e.g. I wanted to run a story on my medical condition, they could interview my doctor if I waiver the confidentiality on my journal. A secret arrest would imply the police could prevent me from telling anyone that I am arrested, or to not acknowledge that I've been arrested.
Hell, around here I can't even get a copy of my criminal record without reason. Employers in general can't ask for one, and even when they're legally required to then only for relevant crimes. So for example I might have to get one to become a school teacher, but it'll say nothing about any tax dodging. Only if I have committed crimes against children that'd make me unfit to be a teacher. Only applying for the police or security clearance in the military will bring out your full record. You make it sound like we'd be some Kafka-esque country with secret trails and all that but we're not. There's more choices than that and public scapegoating the way the US does.
True, but the degree of care is much, much lower. At the last count, my home server could hold the whole print collection of the Library of Congress (10TB). That's pretty much every brain splurge anyone got published as the deposit requirements hit pretty fast. In compressed form, the entire English wikipedia is ~6 GB or less than 1/1000th of that. At that point nobody has to really care about the one text, just if anybody is interested enough to keep the archive alive.
Spotify carries 8 million tracks, if we say 5MB/track then that's 40TB. Okay, my server couldn't handle that alone but it'd be no problem for someone who's a fan of rock to have every rock song ever. I think you have to seriously consider the possibility that in the future, we'll have more storage space than the effort it takes to produce something worthwhile to fill it with. And by that I mean every book, photo, song and video consciously made, even all the notorious home videos. Just not every CCTV recording "nothing" 24/7.
After all, even if you gave me near infinite capability to record my own life, I'd have rather limited interest in running around with a photo or video camera all the time, or do band practice or write books. My production tops out, while the true limits of our storage capability are still unknown. Hell, if we got rid of copyright so we could trivially pool all our storage of public media then most people's storage capacity would already be excessive today. I haven't got 10TB of self-produced stuff and never imagine I will.
P.S. I got fed up with Intel when I found out I'd have to throw out my motherboard, CPU and RAM to move from a Core2 Quad to *any* of the i3/5/7 offerings. My motherboard, CPU and RAM were no more than two years old and yet somehow there was no financially sane upgrade path for ANY of the components.
True. But is there one particular component there you really feel needs upgrading? More RAM you probably could add unless you're already maxed, motherboards haven't changed much. I suppose there's the new hex-core processors but the difference between a Core2 quad and i7 quad aren't enough to justify the CPU price I'd say. Or are you just on a two year upgrade cycle out of habit? I'd say that's way too early, then you underbought on your original purchase.
Yes, you can put a AMD hex-core on your old AM2 board that used to house a dual core, but what's the memory penalty going to be like? I haven't seen a single benchmark site that's bothered to test the combination, that it works doesn't always equate to making sense. Over the years I have made exactly one CPU upgrade, from a Duron 700 to Athlon 1200. I suppose if I hadn't switched from AMD to an Intel Q6600 (because AMD had no quad offering at the time) there could be a second time, but... In most cases, by the time performance sucked so bad I wanted to upgrade too much had changed.
1. There is no online distribution (movies are now here)
That should say no significant online distribution, I know there's a few alternatives.
You know, a lot of us were saying that it is unfortunate that there is a market for the iPad, since it is so restrictive and designed to undermine its users' freedoms. If Apple ventures into TV, we will probably wind up saying the same thing, unless Apple decides to do an about-face (I won't hold my breath).
I hope it'd work our kinda like music DRM, movies too are run by a few big studios.
1. There is no online distribution (movies are now here)
2. Apple makes it popular to get it online, but making it an iDevice-only solution
3. Apple gets too much market power over studios, to break free and offer alternatives they must drop DRM (music is now here)
Sometimes I honestly think that if Apple hadn't gotten it started, we still couldn't buy music any other way than a CD...
Wait now, didn't we agree there was no such thing as a market for an iPad? And now we're suddenly discussing what knock-offs will compete for a slice of the profits?
The latter is quite simple, none of the other really get out of the Catch 22. Users don't buy until there's apps and app developers don't develop until there's a market. Unless you're Steve Jobs and provably have millions of followers, then you hit critical hype and get a sufficient quantity of apps and users out there simultaneously to set the snowball rolling. Exhibit A, the iPhone. Out of the box quite satisfactory but nothing special compared to HTC and the other smart phones. But hell, given all the useful and funny and clever (and gimmicky and useless) apps Ive seen for it, even I want one by now. Not because I think Apple is that great, but because that's where the applications are.
I think next they'll make the home entertainment center common - oh they've been around forever with Windows Media Center and such but so had the Windows tablets. I don't really count the AppleTV as one either, it's more of a warmup. Not as a console replacement, but one taking a big chunk out of the "casual" gaming market Nintendo has shown is there with the Wii too. And really bringing that together has the core in your system setup, not a Mac. And possibly finally bring around the TV revolution where more people get series and movies via iTunes over the Internet than over broadcasts and cable. Well, the legal revolution anyway ;).
I'm used to most movies and shows I like being in HD, I certainly notice how fuzzy SD suddenly looks. I find the same with video games, over many years the "state of the art" always looked great despite how much it sucked in retrospect. Nothing saves a bad movie, but there are stuff I wish was produced in much better quality and with better effects. Then again, I'm happy it was made rather than not at all under any circumstances. It just deserved more... persistance, not something you'll so easily say "OMG was that made in the 80s?" - at least those stories not actually set in the 80s...
It's not nearly as important, because most Windows software ship with all their dependencies as well. While 64 bit linux can run 32 bit software, then you need all the libraries to be compiled as 32 bit as well because otherwise pointer sizes would differ. Unless the application uses more than 4GB of RAM, all you miss is a few percent performance.
The same thing needs to be done for internet access (only the kinds provided by a physical wire/fiber, however).
Actually, you don't need to get that drastic. Just regulate and make compulsory the lease of the last mile, so competitors only need lay down central-central fiber. Trying to regulate the entire ISP industry is a much harder and more fast-moving target, power and water are well defined services but broadband is not. You could easily end up killing the incentives to move to better technology because the profits from it will be regulated out of it. Freeing the last mile on the other hand leads to healthy competition.
Bah I got one simpler:
1. Buy a Asus EEE 1001PX
2. Install Ubuntu 10.04
3. Play something on the speaker, that'll work
4. Insert headphones. The speakers will mute but no sound. And yes, I did check that the volume wasn't muted and all that.
That and wireless didn't work until I did a manual kernel update via cable. Sigh. I heard upgrading to 2.6.34 would break the webcam though, but maybe that's been fixed - I haven't checked. And it's still unstable if the wireless will come back after a suspend, sometimes there's no signal at all afterwards.
I use it on my desktop, and my parents do because I fix any stupid shit, but I'm still not recommending it to anyone else without strong geek-fu.
Oh I'm sure there'll be two but the real difference small. Americans seem to fancy that kind of duopoly system.
Yeah, because that'd so improve Linux' image as the OS for basement dweller nerds who can't get laid. And even for those of us who don't mind porn, playing on sex to sell something is so overdone, cheap and lame. It's got nothing to do with the product but let's throw a half-naked lady in our ad, go buy. I'm not sure there's actually that much good porn which is legally distributable, it's just that copyright seems to mean even less for porn than everything else.
What OSS lack is killer apps, and I don't mean Firefox or OpenOffice or GIMP. They're decent contenders but they're not huge hits. I don't care how many times KDE reinvents the semantic desktop and new ways to give me notifications, it's the applications that count. The other part is not being so militantly hostile to closed source, it's choice. Nothing will force you to buy Photoshop for Linux if GIMP makes you happy. For example right now I wish there was a decent video editor for Linux, of any kind. I've tried what's allegedly the best and well.. I'd be willing to pay money for something better.
If I write a book and you take it and pretend that it's yours, most people would call that stealing. You're trying to take something away from me, the right to be recognized as the author. Having my personal information spread around doesn't make it identity theft, but trying to impersonate me does because only I should be recognized as myself. Though when it comes to immaterial things, fraud is probably the better word. However, identity fraud sounds like you are the one being defrauded, you're not. You're just the person whose identity was used.
Just because it complies with some formal coding styles and formatting doesn't say anything about the actual content and sanity of the structure. Very many systems seem to get do-overs on a regular basis.
Thanks, but I know plenty. To get rid of AACS all you need is the MKB derived from the player key, but open source doesn't have that either. The other part of most BluRay disc protection is BD+ which works pretty much like I said. And now they're just starting to top it off with Cinavia too, an audio watermark that'll prevent decrypted copies from playing on hardware players. If you have a decrypted copy of The Losers (Region A) and a fully updated PS3, the sound will die after 20 minutes and a nasty message will tell you it's not licensed. Pretty soon you have to reencode to have the damn thing play or use a HTPC and an unlicensed player.
Its not like people have stopped breaking these codecs. Eventually they will be broken. All of them. (...) They are doing it for the joy of cracking a puzzle. (...) The economics of constantly updating the rom in players can't match the cracking joy the kids get breaking into them.
You really don't get how modern DRM works, do you? They don't have to constantly update the ROM, they just reveal the functionality bit by bit with new discs and so there's an endless war to reverse engineer and update the decryption software. It's a war of attrition and they're winning, it's more puzzles than people are willing to work on just for shits and giggles. It literally takes manyears of dedicated work to continuously update the tool and open source is lagging more and more behind, not closing up.
So anyone who produces IP, instead of things that can be exported, represents a net loss of wealth to the country - they take money *only* from other Americans, while spending that money all over the world.
What does the US economy more good - buying a movie made by Americans or buying cheap imports from China? Reducing imports by producing something valuable domestically is just as important as increasing exports if you want to reach a trade balance. There's plenty of rich left in the US, but pretty much the whole meat of the economy has been moved to China so there's nothing produced in the US worth buying and so the unemployment stays at 10%. Killing a "local" industry, even if it doesn't contribute to export only makes the situation worse.
The real problem is that the US has a fairytale economy driven only by consumption and retail. Everything done to kick start the economy is about getting people to spend more money they don't have, because it creates the illusion of stability and recovery when the problem runs much deeper. The real problem is that retail outlets are worth very little to anyone else, they only have value as long as they serve people with money. And even those people still with a job should take note and realize they need a nest egg for a long and ugly unemployment, I find the consumer confidence astoundingly high given the circumstances. But then nobody saw the credit crunch coming to slap them silly either, so I guess they won't see the structural crisis either...
Or Europe, after the EUCD. And it won't be most other places either, after ACTA. But over time you realize the law isn't a perfect democratic tool but often run by special interest groups, and how little the law means if sufficiently many disagree with it.
If they had the power to take down BluRay decrypters, they'd be going after the commercial tools that actually work. This is roughly the umpteenth open source library announced and what they all have in common is that they don't work on any of the newer movies with MKBv11 or higher and/or anything more than the simplest forms of BD+ protection. It's unlikely open source will catch up until the MPAA gives up the DRM fight, you may not see it but there's still a constant war of updates to make the decrypters work on new discs.
there is pretty much a presumption of guilt now for any such accusation, even if it's in the midst of a nasty divorce/custody case or if the victim has a clear financial gain in making an accusation.
I think the point is that divorce and custody cases must be settled, you can't go back to where you were. That false accusations happen in nasty divorce/custody cases is mixed with many real events leading to nasty divorce/custody cases, the timing doesn't make it less credible. Imagine that you're a parent that suspects your child has been abused somehow, but you can't get any clear answers on what or who and no hard evidence only sensing abrupt changes in behavior, or even if you do they're so unclear and inconsistent you don't think they'll hold up in criminal court. Fortunately parents don't need that and can act if they think their child has possibly or probably been abused. As damn well they should.
In the marriage you can become a guardian hawk looking after your children all the time, but after a divorce you can't. You'll have to fully hand over custody of the children part of the time, even if it's just for a weekend. Would you let them go without a fight, even if you knew you don't have proof? Hell no. You'd make desperate accusations in the hope that somehow they'll stick, and if they don't at least you did everything possible to let people know. Trying to prosecute "groundless accusations" harder would quite often lead to other miscarriages of justice, unfortunately it's pretty hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it didn't happen too. But you have to deal with all the situations that lie in the middle somehow.
Imagine you knew as a fact that the parent in front of you is with 50% probability abusive. If you had ten such cases, what would you pick? Five cases of children being wrongfully taken from their parents or five children sent to homes you had good reason to suspect was abusive? After all 50% is massively higher than your average home, and even if CPS are alerted they have the same dilemma of pestering innocents versus uncovering disguised abuse. Victims have after all often been manipulated or threatened into silence and don't openly admit to being abused. Would is matter if it was 80%? 20%? 1%? Somewhere we draw the line, and there's no good pretending that we should have some divine insight and always know and not talk of probabilities. Some of these cases we will get wrong, it's only a question of what wrongs matter more.
Imagine you took two solved cubes and twisted the top third of one and the bottom third of the other. The path to a solution has length 1 but getting from one to the other has length 2, so it's not automatically equivalent. However, specifically for the full Rubrik's cube you may be correct. If we take the arbitrary end position, take off all the stickers and reattach them as a solved cube, then there must be a solution from the solved cube to the starting position. So using the same moves we should be able to get between any arbitrary configuration in 20 moves. But of course you already understood that and I just had to spell out the details ;)
Yes, and cosmological timescales are so much larger than ours. If we wait another 10000 years then it'll go from 65.50 to 65.51 million years since the dinosaurs went extinct. There's nothing here that needs doing now or in the next ten or hundred or even thousand years. We could easily have spent another million years on the monkey stage, there's no reason to think we need to get off this rock the same cosmological millisecond we figure out how. We're much better off figuring how to head off killer asteroids and hope 12000 km of earth means someone will survive on the back side if we're hit by a massive gamma blast. And if shit happens in our solar system then the whole system may be FUBAR, it's not really until we have a habitable exoplanet that we have a real backup to earth.
Micropayments would go nowhere, there'd be too many ways to be an asshat racking up charges for innocent people by having trojans send spam, bombing sign-up forms with email lists and so on, never mind the money would go have to go somewhere so the ISP collecting it would run their own profit racket. There'd be charge disputes and the whole nine yards.
The real issue is that email was never designed with any standard way of separating solicited and unsolicited mail, creating and disposing of temporary or single-purpose addresses or anything like that. It was all one big open directory like a phone book and one big inbox for recieving all your mail. IMs have fared much better than e-mail when it comes to avoiding spam and the same has Facebook, both without micropayments. It's just that for email you can't get away from that lowest common denominator of accepting pretty much all mail that has you in the "To:" field.
Why is it always assumed that people who spend $2500 on a computer have an unlimited amount of money?
It means they obviously had the cash to get a slightly less pimped computer and leave something for their game budget. The only way you end up with $0 left over is if you thought games are free anyway. That finding $60 in your budget is an inconvienience to you is a very poor excuse. And if you don't got the cash, why isn't settling for free or bargain bin games you can afford good enough? If you can't afford to buy a brand new car you might have to settle for a 10 year old one. I am in favor of abolishing copyright, but don't pretend it would be so horrible if software worked like the real world - if you can't afford it, suck it up, find the money or go without. The mindset that you can have anything you feel like whether you can afford it or not is exactly what brought on the credit crunch, only with copyright infringement it doesn't come back to bite you in the ass later.
I'd argue that computers in pre-GUI times had a much lower learning curve to get to the point of programming.
And the bar for what was considered "professional" programming was much lower. I remember programming my C64, and I could do the same kind of blocky sprites and beep-beep music that almost kinda looked like a game someone would sell. It was at least "in range", so to speak. Whereas today most games are a huge team effort with high quality art, music etc., neither a one man garage developer nor one kid in front of a computer.