Actually, Slashdot isn't really covering the war; they've posted far less info than other news sites. What they're doing is creating a couple of places where people can post comments about it.
Makes sense, really, since it helps to keep comments about the war from mixing into other stories.
[1] The reasons for the Colonies leaving English rule are the reasons for the U.S.'s existence. That ought to carry some weight, even if the Declaration of Independence is not a legally binding document like the Constitution.
[2] Yes, the "all men are created equal" statement (which is in the Declaration) implies that men were created. Man's "creation" is not essential to my argument. Also, your observation that people are not equal in their strength, intelligence, etc., is also true, but also non-essential. The equality the Declaration refers to is equality before the law, which is what King George denied (and what all tyrants still deny today). (Jefferson also wrote a paragraph about how slavery was an example of keeping men unequal before the law. He had to strike that paragraph in order to get the South to vote for the Declaration, but the paragraph is still true.) The principle is that everyone has the same rights.
Rights are not the same thing as capabilities. Just because you're not currently capable of exercising a right doesn't mean it doesn't exist; you may yet become capable of exercising it in the future, and you should not be stopped by having the right taken away. When you infringe someone else's rights, then you've exceeded your own, but your rights are otherwise unlimited (and so are everybody else's). Which means, you have the right to unlimited profit; acquiring skill in exercising that right is up to you.
[3] Some people seem to think that you have the right to pursue happiness as long as you never obtain it. Others seem to think that obtaining it is OK, as long as you don't obtain more than they obtain. In order to disagree with these notions I have to claim that, yes, you do have the right to obtain happiness (and profits), without limit, as long as you can do so without infringing anybody else's rights. You'll note that I said that the first time. And that, pretty much, is my entire point!
I can't even say that guaranteed profits are wrong: in some cases, you even have the right to that, such as when the person guaranteeing it has done so voluntarily (e.g., through a contract where you've already held up your end). What you don't have the right to is profit at the expense of someone else's rights. This is what happens, for example, when the government guarantees you a profit by taxing it away from people: that's like using the government to pick people's pockets. It dispenses with the idea of equality of rights because clearly the people paying the tax aren't legally equal to the beneficiaries.
[4] Obviously I don't think it's wrong to run projects on sourceforge; I run one. However, it is profit from other activities that makes non-profit activities possible... and sometimes necessary. There are lots of ways to profit later by giving code away now. I'm giving away free samples.
[5] The concept of "profit" is broader than just money. There's barter, which produces no monetary profit, and there's also just making your life easier. If your wheeled invention saves you time, then you've profited from the invention, just not monetarily. A business, even a corporation, could derive a similar benefit from some unpatentable invention of its own; non-monetary profit might free up resources that could be profitably used elsewhere.
[6] Just because you file a patent doesn't mean you have to manufacture the thing yourself. That's what licensing is all about. The patent only requires that you build a prototype and then you can write letters to companies telling them how they can save a fortune by buying an exclusive (or non-exclusive) license to your patent. That's the way patents are supposed to be used.
[7] I don't believe in compulsory patents. In fact, one flaw in the current system is that "prior art" all too often only includes patented prior art, because the patent office only searches its own databases. That flaw makes patents seem compulsory. Even if you want to give your idea away, in our current system it seems that you still have to patent it to prevent others from patenting it.
[8] I agree that there are some serious problems with the patent system. I don't think the whole system is flawed. The specific changes I would recommend are beyond the scope of this already-overlong post.
[9] It's rude to call people "idiot," especially on so little evidence. Try to be civilized!
Finally, I'll say that the opposite of a right is a privilege, which is exercised only by permission. If profit is not a right, then it is a privilege, subject to government permission, to be granted or denied at the government's whim. That is the idea to which I object.
You can prevent people from profiting off of you, but you cannot rightfully prevent them from profiting off of others, if they can. Whatever profit they make is their right, and they have the right to seek more. And that is my point.
Yes it is: the Declaration of Independence lists "pursuit of happiness" as a right. You have the right to pursue profits (if you can do so without infringing anybody else's rights), and you have the right not to be prevented from attaining them. Also, once you make a profit, it's your property and you have a right to property, too.
On the other hand, if your plan for happiness consists of "I'll let them do all the work and then I'll take advantage of the results," that is hardly consistent with all men being created equal; it is a society of slaves and masters.
And second... profit is demonstrably not a necessary part of software development and innovation...
If I don't profit, I can't afford to do it, QED. Sure, ideas are a dime a dozen, and I trip over dozens of the little things when I get out of bed in the morning. But guess what: if you want to turn one of them into a physical product or a typed-in program, it takes work, and that eats up time and resources and money that could have gone to other things. Now, if two dozen people come up with the same idea, but only one of them puts forth the effort to make the thing real, then why should the other 23 do-nothings get to share equally in the results?
because that's what I saw. But Slashdot chopped off my parenthetical. Had I but pressed Preview, I could have used hyphens instead and that would have worked. Darn.
Somebody ought to invent a bootloader similar to Lilo or Grub which actually implements the OpenFirmware standard. That would be cool. Of course, then it really would live in a partition on the hard disk rather than in ROM.
Actually, you could do that. No, seriously! It would be equivalent to the government printing as much money as the economy needs and then printing some more for itself. Of course, you would have constant inflation, but then, the loss of value of your dollars would be exactly the amount of your tax.
Just a thought, but giving a subsidy to one group is the same as punishing everybody who didn't get the subsidy. So it's really a kind of censorship: "If your web site offers pages favorable to our cause, we'll give you a subsidy. And if not, you'll have to pay the same taxes anyway, part of which are used for the subsidy."
Isn't this a big fat subsidy for one group which claims to know what's right for kids, even though there are others who disagree? How much is a TLD worth, would you say?
Actually there are a lot of possible applications for broadcast which dont have anything to do with music and movies. For example, you ever notice how the whole freaking internet slows down whenever id Software releases a new game? Or at least the popular FTP sites do! Well, what if there were a file broadcast protocol where id Software could simply repeat the file over and over (or broadcast it at announced times) and people could tune in and receive it? Anyone could do the same thing with Linux kernel releases or other GNU programs, without consuming server-level bandwidth. (Tune in at 10 AM Sundays for the latest version!)
I think it would mean something if people with high programming ability always reliably selected certain languages to code in, and rejected others -- don't you? Maybe they pick certain languages because they are easier or better to program in.
If they didn't, if instead they always picked the difficult language because they wanted to prove to the world that they were awesome enough to handle that language, then there is always the possibility that some dumb programmer with an ordinary language like C will come along and... wait a minute...
What they need to do is hire seperate tech-support people for each platform and offer a different 800 number. Just like they would do for English/Spanish.
The simplest solution is this: allow all preferences to be stored in a single file. Allow that file to be posted on the web. And then allow every OS to have a box somewhere, which itself is not customizable (but which is easily ignored), where you can type the URL of your preferences, and thus put them into effect.
I can create my custom settings at home, put them on my personal webpage, go to work, type the URL into the box, and wham! Just like home.
Somebody else wants to use my computer, hey, they just type their URL into the box, and it looks just like ''they'' are used to.
Everybody else can do this too, and of course the "defaults" would have a URL, too, so if you didn't want to use your own you could just enter that URL and be back to normal.
Then everybody gets what they want, unless what they want is the ability to impose their user interface decisions on other people.
All Microsoft has to do to kill [OpenGL] now is refuse to license their 3D patents to any hardware vendor who chooses to make OpenGL drivers instead of DirectX.
And all the hardware vendors have to do is refuse to manufacture video cards that support DirectX unless they are allowed to also support OpenGL. Write your hardware vendors!
The Wiki Wiki Web is a set of editable, cross-referenced web pages. Anybody can view them and anybody can edit them, and they are searchable. Wikis are pretty useful for internal documentation projects. It should be possible to extend the concept to add the security that is typically required and to add support for XML. Of course, all that means I am practically suggesting you write your own custom Wiki, which may take too long for you. But you could probably start with an existing Wiki and get good results. I have set up UseModWiki (which is a CGI script written in Perl) and gotten good results.
After Northpoint's internet service went out, Timothy's thoughts went out! Then other people's thoughts started going out as well! Brains all across America are shutting down, going dark! It's the end! Aaagh!
I don't know how they've actually implemented it, but this is the way I would attempt to add copy control to an existing drive standard. If they do it the way I am describing, then it isn't a bad thing, although they might have screwed it up any number of ways.
(1) If you don't use the copy control features, then the drive behaves exactly like an ordinary hard drive. So you'd be able to continue to use all of your "legacy" operating systems and applications, and any new ones, provided they are written in the same way as the old ones, with no modifications.
Failure of manufacturers to allow this would mean that you could not even use the drive without paying for special software, and that would pretty much make the new drives DOA as far as sales. So trust me: the new drives are compatible with the old ones.
(2) However, certain new software (think DVD copiers) will try to check to see if the current hard drive is compliant with the copy-control standard. It will probably ask for an RSA-signed "certificate of copy-control" that it can verify. Software won't be able to fake it; the RSA key necessary to generate the certificate will only be licensed to hardware manufacturers under strict NDAs, although the key to verify it will be everywhere. If the drive isn't copy-control compliant, then the new software may choose not to run, or to run with restricted features. Sorry!
Also, the software will have to authenticate itself to the drive, in order to be granted permission to use the encryption features. After all, any software that used the encryption features would be able to decrypt encrypted sectors! That means, to write such a program, you would have to get a certificate you could present to drives, that the drives would verify. In order to do that, you'd probably have to submit your code to some board somewhere, which would make sure that your program didn't compromise the security.
But remember, this is not "all new software." This is software that will not be written at all until Hollywood is satisfied that their content will be safe. The key will be expensive, so most software vendors won't bother with acquiring one unless they think they can afford it, and that means most new software won't be copy-controlled. So, not only do you lose nothing by using a copy-controlled drive, but you gain something that you would not otherwise have been given.
(3) The hard drive's copy-control mechanisms will basically allow "trusted applications" to read and write on the drive in a hardware-encrypted manner. The encryption key used is unique to the drive and is never revealed to the CPU or any software. Sectors will be encrypted and decrypted individually, and in a way independent of where they are located on the disk. The new applications will need a few new OS features, so that the OS can basically show the new applications which sectors to write into or read from, given a file handle. But that's all the OS has to give the "trusted applications," besides access to the hard drive's encryption features. As long as the OS can lead the applications to their sectors, the applications will not care where the sectors physically are on the disk. So all existing file systems will work with copy-controlled files. The existing file systems don't even have to set a bit or anything to indicate whether the file is copy-controlled. Ordinary applications will see unencrypted sectors which are normal, and encrypted sectors which they don't know the key to, but whych they don't have to know the key to. Ordinary applications will still be able to read, overwrite, copy, and move the encrypted sectors at will. If the old applications keep the encrypted sectors on the same drive, the new applications will still be able to decrypt them, no matter where they have been moved to, as long as the OS can still find them. This means that all fears about losing defragmentation utilities, losing EXT2FS, losing Partition Magic, etc., are ill-founded. If old applications move the encrypted sectors to other drives, then new applications will not be able to read them in their correctly decrypted form until they are copied back to the original drive.
(4) Naturally, the key has to be stored somewhere. In removable disks, it makes sense to store the encryption key in a "secret sector" on the disk. Then, only trusted programs can re-encrypt data as it is moved from disk to disk. (You'll still be able to back up and everything, but if an un-trusted program restores the encrypted files to a different disk, the encryption key will be wrong and the files won't be decrypted correctly. Wouldn't it be great if every disk had a human-readable serial number on it, too, and if you damage the disk, you can send it to a disk replacement service, and they'll make a new disk with the same key on it, so you can restore your backups! But if you couldn't do that, only the copy-controlled files wouldn't restore; all the regular stuff would be unaffected.) On hard disks, the encryption key can be stored in ROM or on the disk. I rather like that idea; if your hard disk crashes, you can send it back but keep the ROM chip, and insert that chip into the replacement drive when you get it. The idea is that any application can copy the files, but the "trusted applications" will not be able to correctly decrypt data that has been copied, until it is copied back.
Actually, I don't think this copy control is necessarily a bad thing, provided it's implemented in a manner similar to the above, and provided that "certificates of trustworthiness" aren't too hard or too easy for the necessary parties to get.
If they're implementing it this way, I don't mind, because I will be able to ignore it. But I hope they don't screw it up.
Slashdot Mirror
...it sends a "destructive wave" to destroy the transmitting device!
Actually, Slashdot isn't really covering the war; they've posted far less info than other news sites. What they're doing is creating a couple of places where people can post comments about it.
Makes sense, really, since it helps to keep comments about the war from mixing into other stories.
So many points to address, so little time.
[1] The reasons for the Colonies leaving English rule are the reasons for the U.S.'s existence. That ought to carry some weight, even if the Declaration of Independence is not a legally binding document like the Constitution.
[2] Yes, the "all men are created equal" statement (which is in the Declaration) implies that men were created. Man's "creation" is not essential to my argument. Also, your observation that people are not equal in their strength, intelligence, etc., is also true, but also non-essential. The equality the Declaration refers to is equality before the law, which is what King George denied (and what all tyrants still deny today). (Jefferson also wrote a paragraph about how slavery was an example of keeping men unequal before the law. He had to strike that paragraph in order to get the South to vote for the Declaration, but the paragraph is still true.) The principle is that everyone has the same rights.
Rights are not the same thing as capabilities. Just because you're not currently capable of exercising a right doesn't mean it doesn't exist; you may yet become capable of exercising it in the future, and you should not be stopped by having the right taken away. When you infringe someone else's rights, then you've exceeded your own, but your rights are otherwise unlimited (and so are everybody else's). Which means, you have the right to unlimited profit; acquiring skill in exercising that right is up to you.
[3] Some people seem to think that you have the right to pursue happiness as long as you never obtain it. Others seem to think that obtaining it is OK, as long as you don't obtain more than they obtain. In order to disagree with these notions I have to claim that, yes, you do have the right to obtain happiness (and profits), without limit, as long as you can do so without infringing anybody else's rights. You'll note that I said that the first time. And that, pretty much, is my entire point!
I can't even say that guaranteed profits are wrong: in some cases, you even have the right to that, such as when the person guaranteeing it has done so voluntarily (e.g., through a contract where you've already held up your end). What you don't have the right to is profit at the expense of someone else's rights. This is what happens, for example, when the government guarantees you a profit by taxing it away from people: that's like using the government to pick people's pockets. It dispenses with the idea of equality of rights because clearly the people paying the tax aren't legally equal to the beneficiaries.
[4] Obviously I don't think it's wrong to run projects on sourceforge; I run one. However, it is profit from other activities that makes non-profit activities possible... and sometimes necessary. There are lots of ways to profit later by giving code away now. I'm giving away free samples.
[5] The concept of "profit" is broader than just money. There's barter, which produces no monetary profit, and there's also just making your life easier. If your wheeled invention saves you time, then you've profited from the invention, just not monetarily. A business, even a corporation, could derive a similar benefit from some unpatentable invention of its own; non-monetary profit might free up resources that could be profitably used elsewhere.
[6] Just because you file a patent doesn't mean you have to manufacture the thing yourself. That's what licensing is all about. The patent only requires that you build a prototype and then you can write letters to companies telling them how they can save a fortune by buying an exclusive (or non-exclusive) license to your patent. That's the way patents are supposed to be used.
[7] I don't believe in compulsory patents. In fact, one flaw in the current system is that "prior art" all too often only includes patented prior art, because the patent office only searches its own databases. That flaw makes patents seem compulsory. Even if you want to give your idea away, in our current system it seems that you still have to patent it to prevent others from patenting it.
[8] I agree that there are some serious problems with the patent system. I don't think the whole system is flawed. The specific changes I would recommend are beyond the scope of this already-overlong post.
[9] It's rude to call people "idiot," especially on so little evidence. Try to be civilized!
Finally, I'll say that the opposite of a right is a privilege, which is exercised only by permission. If profit is not a right, then it is a privilege, subject to government permission, to be granted or denied at the government's whim. That is the idea to which I object.
You can prevent people from profiting off of you, but you cannot rightfully prevent them from profiting off of others, if they can. Whatever profit they make is their right, and they have the right to seek more. And that is my point.
First of all, profit is not a right.
Yes it is: the Declaration of Independence lists "pursuit of happiness" as a right. You have the right to pursue profits (if you can do so without infringing anybody else's rights), and you have the right not to be prevented from attaining them. Also, once you make a profit, it's your property and you have a right to property, too.
On the other hand, if your plan for happiness consists of "I'll let them do all the work and then I'll take advantage of the results," that is hardly consistent with all men being created equal; it is a society of slaves and masters.
And second... profit is demonstrably not a necessary part of software development and innovation...
If I don't profit, I can't afford to do it, QED. Sure, ideas are a dime a dozen, and I trip over dozens of the little things when I get out of bed in the morning. But guess what: if you want to turn one of them into a physical product or a typed-in program, it takes work, and that eats up time and resources and money that could have gone to other things. Now, if two dozen people come up with the same idea, but only one of them puts forth the effort to make the thing real, then why should the other 23 do-nothings get to share equally in the results?
I once saw one that used Sony Minidiscs and supported only four tracks. It looked like this or this.
I meant to title the above comment
because that's what I saw. But Slashdot chopped off my parenthetical. Had I but pressed Preview, I could have used hyphens instead and that would have worked. Darn.
It sure is. (snicker)
Somebody ought to invent a bootloader similar to Lilo or Grub which actually implements the OpenFirmware standard. That would be cool. Of course, then it really would live in a partition on the hard disk rather than in ROM.
Sigh. Right again.
We need a new frontier.
Good point, but I was referring to human parasites like tax collectors and religious persecutors.
Makes sense. That's why the colonists came to America. Damned European parasites.
Actually, you could do that. No, seriously! It would be equivalent to the government printing as much money as the economy needs and then printing some more for itself. Of course, you would have constant inflation, but then, the loss of value of your dollars would be exactly the amount of your tax.
Wasn't that the name of Andy Farmer's novel in that movie Funny Farm?
Just a thought, but giving a subsidy to one group is the same as punishing everybody who didn't get the subsidy. So it's really a kind of censorship: "If your web site offers pages favorable to our cause, we'll give you a subsidy. And if not, you'll have to pay the same taxes anyway, part of which are used for the subsidy."
Isn't this a big fat subsidy for one group which claims to know what's right for kids, even though there are others who disagree? How much is a TLD worth, would you say?
Actually there are a lot of possible applications for broadcast which dont have anything to do with music and movies. For example, you ever notice how the whole freaking internet slows down whenever id Software releases a new game? Or at least the popular FTP sites do! Well, what if there were a file broadcast protocol where id Software could simply repeat the file over and over (or broadcast it at announced times) and people could tune in and receive it? Anyone could do the same thing with Linux kernel releases or other GNU programs, without consuming server-level bandwidth. (Tune in at 10 AM Sundays for the latest version!)
Multicast doesnt mean multimedia.
The Department of Redundancy Department! (With apologies to Richard Lederer...)
I don't think Don understands that the Linux kernel is "dictated" by Linus Torvalds and Perl is "dictated" by Larry Wall, etc.
Yes, there is a threat of forking. But that's what keeps these "dictators" honest.
I think it would mean something if people with high programming ability always reliably selected certain languages to code in, and rejected others -- don't you? Maybe they pick certain languages because they are easier or better to program in.
If they didn't, if instead they always picked the difficult language because they wanted to prove to the world that they were awesome enough to handle that language, then there is always the possibility that some dumb programmer with an ordinary language like C will come along and... wait a minute...
What they need to do is hire seperate tech-support people for each platform and offer a different 800 number. Just like they would do for English/Spanish.
I wonder how well a musical debugger would illustrate the functionality of Don Knuth's Dancing Links.
The simplest solution is this: allow all preferences to be stored in a single file. Allow that file to be posted on the web. And then allow every OS to have a box somewhere, which itself is not customizable (but which is easily ignored), where you can type the URL of your preferences, and thus put them into effect.
I can create my custom settings at home, put them on my personal webpage, go to work, type the URL into the box, and wham! Just like home.
Somebody else wants to use my computer, hey, they just type their URL into the box, and it looks just like ''they'' are used to.
Everybody else can do this too, and of course the "defaults" would have a URL, too, so if you didn't want to use your own you could just enter that URL and be back to normal.
Then everybody gets what they want, unless what they want is the ability to impose their user interface decisions on other people.
-- Sunlighter
All Microsoft has to do to kill [OpenGL] now is refuse to license their 3D patents to any hardware vendor who chooses to make OpenGL drivers instead of DirectX.
And all the hardware vendors have to do is refuse to manufacture video cards that support DirectX unless they are allowed to also support OpenGL. Write your hardware vendors!
The Wiki Wiki Web is a set of editable, cross-referenced web pages. Anybody can view them and anybody can edit them, and they are searchable. Wikis are pretty useful for internal documentation projects. It should be possible to extend the concept to add the security that is typically required and to add support for XML. Of course, all that means I am practically suggesting you write your own custom Wiki, which may take too long for you. But you could probably start with an existing Wiki and get good results. I have set up UseModWiki (which is a CGI script written in Perl) and gotten good results.
Hope this helps!
After Northpoint's internet service went out, Timothy's thoughts went out! Then other people's thoughts started going out as well! Brains all across America are shutting down, going dark! It's the end! Aaagh!
Wait a minute...
I don't know how they've actually implemented it, but this is the way I would attempt to add copy control to an existing drive standard. If they do it the way I am describing, then it isn't a bad thing, although they might have screwed it up any number of ways.
(1) If you don't use the copy control features, then the drive behaves exactly like an ordinary hard drive. So you'd be able to continue to use all of your "legacy" operating systems and applications, and any new ones, provided they are written in the same way as the old ones, with no modifications.
Failure of manufacturers to allow this would mean that you could not even use the drive without paying for special software, and that would pretty much make the new drives DOA as far as sales. So trust me: the new drives are compatible with the old ones.
(2) However, certain new software (think DVD copiers) will try to check to see if the current hard drive is compliant with the copy-control standard. It will probably ask for an RSA-signed "certificate of copy-control" that it can verify. Software won't be able to fake it; the RSA key necessary to generate the certificate will only be licensed to hardware manufacturers under strict NDAs, although the key to verify it will be everywhere. If the drive isn't copy-control compliant, then the new software may choose not to run, or to run with restricted features. Sorry!
Also, the software will have to authenticate itself to the drive, in order to be granted permission to use the encryption features. After all, any software that used the encryption features would be able to decrypt encrypted sectors! That means, to write such a program, you would have to get a certificate you could present to drives, that the drives would verify. In order to do that, you'd probably have to submit your code to some board somewhere, which would make sure that your program didn't compromise the security.
But remember, this is not "all new software." This is software that will not be written at all until Hollywood is satisfied that their content will be safe. The key will be expensive, so most software vendors won't bother with acquiring one unless they think they can afford it, and that means most new software won't be copy-controlled. So, not only do you lose nothing by using a copy-controlled drive, but you gain something that you would not otherwise have been given.
(3) The hard drive's copy-control mechanisms will basically allow "trusted applications" to read and write on the drive in a hardware-encrypted manner. The encryption key used is unique to the drive and is never revealed to the CPU or any software. Sectors will be encrypted and decrypted individually, and in a way independent of where they are located on the disk. The new applications will need a few new OS features, so that the OS can basically show the new applications which sectors to write into or read from, given a file handle. But that's all the OS has to give the "trusted applications," besides access to the hard drive's encryption features. As long as the OS can lead the applications to their sectors, the applications will not care where the sectors physically are on the disk. So all existing file systems will work with copy-controlled files. The existing file systems don't even have to set a bit or anything to indicate whether the file is copy-controlled. Ordinary applications will see unencrypted sectors which are normal, and encrypted sectors which they don't know the key to, but whych they don't have to know the key to. Ordinary applications will still be able to read, overwrite, copy, and move the encrypted sectors at will. If the old applications keep the encrypted sectors on the same drive, the new applications will still be able to decrypt them, no matter where they have been moved to, as long as the OS can still find them. This means that all fears about losing defragmentation utilities, losing EXT2FS, losing Partition Magic, etc., are ill-founded. If old applications move the encrypted sectors to other drives, then new applications will not be able to read them in their correctly decrypted form until they are copied back to the original drive.
(4) Naturally, the key has to be stored somewhere. In removable disks, it makes sense to store the encryption key in a "secret sector" on the disk. Then, only trusted programs can re-encrypt data as it is moved from disk to disk. (You'll still be able to back up and everything, but if an un-trusted program restores the encrypted files to a different disk, the encryption key will be wrong and the files won't be decrypted correctly. Wouldn't it be great if every disk had a human-readable serial number on it, too, and if you damage the disk, you can send it to a disk replacement service, and they'll make a new disk with the same key on it, so you can restore your backups! But if you couldn't do that, only the copy-controlled files wouldn't restore; all the regular stuff would be unaffected.) On hard disks, the encryption key can be stored in ROM or on the disk. I rather like that idea; if your hard disk crashes, you can send it back but keep the ROM chip, and insert that chip into the replacement drive when you get it. The idea is that any application can copy the files, but the "trusted applications" will not be able to correctly decrypt data that has been copied, until it is copied back.
Actually, I don't think this copy control is necessarily a bad thing, provided it's implemented in a manner similar to the above, and provided that "certificates of trustworthiness" aren't too hard or too easy for the necessary parties to get.
If they're implementing it this way, I don't mind, because I will be able to ignore it. But I hope they don't screw it up.
-- Sunlighter