"In an engine you break the gasoline into millions of pieces and then ignite them in a chamber, making a controlled explosion. You do that continuously in your car," Xu said. "A higher gas pressure might do a better job of breaking the fuel into smaller, more uniform pieces. But determining that would require further experiments more accurately simulating the splash process as it occurs under fuel-combustion conditions," he said.
What do you call it when the cop gives you a kilo of grass, tells you it's free, then busts you for having it?
Or closer to this case: If somebody comes up and hands me a bunch of weed for free, then goes and gets a cop and tells them I have weed, and the cop comes and busts me?
Basically, somebody gave the guy servers and loaded warez onto them, then told the cops to bust the man. You can't tell me that's right. I may not know the legal terminology here, but it still ain't right nevertheless.
I've been doing work recently with a digital signature capture system on a PDA type of device. The signatures it captures are *very* good. The weird thing though is the response time is delayed, so you don't actually see the signature as you write it. However, it captures it all, and the resulting printout has some kind of funky pressure algorithim applied to it so that harder pressed spots are darker and the whole thing has a slight smoothing applied to it.
In any case, it is impressive on the printout, just not on the screen as you do it.
However, if it were to keep him from holding them in contempt, then his judgement for them to reveal the sources really wouldn't have a whole lot of force behind it. They could just blow it off, more or less.
What makes someone a journalist? Is it circulation in the millions? Is it a press pass? Is it a crumpled fedora? These days any hack with a blog can wrap something in HTML, slap a google ad on it, and call it journalism. Does that make it so?
Yes, yes it does.
The very word itself defines what it is: Journalist = someone who writes a journal.
This isn't rocket science here. Freedom of speech means exactly what it says. I can start up a way to communicate to the people and communicate anything I damn well please. Nobody can stop me from doing it. This is the very backbone of freedom of speech.
I don't need to have a mass market. I don't need to have financial backing. Ben Franklin started with a single printing press, you know.
The only limitations you can place on such free speech are those of truth. Slander isn't allowed, for example. If you're going to talk shit about somebody, you better make sure that it's true. Truth is the ultimate defense for the journalist in this respect.
Does everything written to a wiki or a blog get full first amendment protection
Everything written anywhere gets full First Amendment protection. Period. Not too difficult to grasp here.
However, I consider it a matter of fact to be decided by the courts whether a given individual is afforded these protections, as they should never be automatic.
See, that's where we differ. First Amendment protection should be automatic *unless* you can show a valid reason why it does not apply. Showing harm to a person or group of people isn't good enough, you have to show why such protections in any given case are detrimental to society as a whole. I can show that shouting Fire in a theater is dangerous to those people in that theater and to society as a whole if it were to be allowed, so therefore it doesn't get 1A protection. That's the reasoning that should be used: 1A is automatic unless you can explain why it should not be.
Does it have to be? Does it have to be just a television program? Can't it grow into something more? Can't it be a movement? Can't it be a means to spreading a message of hope and logic and tolerance?
...when they're using cryptographic methods and not giving you the public keys to be able to send the audio to the device yourself?
iTunes had to be hacked to obtain the public keys to be able to send audio to the device. Open protocols can be used to lock devices down too, you know.
I'm curious how they pulled this off. Does the iTunes Sharing protocol (DAAP) support file upload? Or are they pushing the music in some other way?
You run a client on the machine with iTunes. When you hit "Sync" in the client, it talks to the server, copies the files to the local machine, then uses iTunes COM interface to add the files into the iTunes Library.
Basically it syncs iTunes to the server in the same basic way that the iPod can sync to iTunes.
There was also some speculation as to how consumers could deal with this.
Mainly, they can sue. It's called price-discrimination, and it's illegal.
Now, proving it using the Robinson-Patman Act (1936) is not the easiest thing in the world to do. There's loads of exceptions, sort of thing. But nevertheless, public outcry and a highly public case against the first person who tried this sort of thing would likely be enough to put a stop to it.
Amazon.com tried something like this several years back, didn't they? Different customers got different prices. They dumped it, I think, because of all the attention it got when people noticed it happening.
Can management remain happy by keeping their baby to themselves, or would GPL require that the source to 'a' be made available?
If this code is all purely internal, and you're not distributing it outside the company, then you can do essentially whatever you want. The GPL only really covers distribution in that respect. It does have some words about modification of GPL'd code, but nothing there requires you to release or distribute your modifications to other people.
The above assumes someone else wrote 'b' and 'c'. How would the scenario change if I wrote 'b' and 'c'? Would it then be possible to keep management happy, and if so what would the licensing structure be?
If you wrote B and C, and don't have some clause where all your work is owned by the company, then it's a different matter. You own the copyright, so you can do essentially whatever the hell you want. If the company owns the copyright, then you'd have to convince them to release B and C as GPL instead.
But essentially, the owner of a piece of code can do anything they damn well please. The only catch here is in accepting patches back from other people. If you release a piece of code as GPL and somebody makes a patch, then they have created a derivative work and it's under the GPL now with respect to you. So you can't take those patches and then shove them back into something you're doing. Oh, you can if the ABC software is only distributed internally, you just can't relicense those patches under any other type of licensing scheme.
The point here is that if ABC is something you only use internally anyway, then it makes little difference what the licensing scheme on the code is. You just can't come back and distribute ABC later. If distributing ABC as a whole is a possibility, then licensing matters, but assuming all of ABC was written by people in the company or by you or what have you, then it doesn't matter all that much. You're hardly likely to sue yourself for violation of your license.
The only case where you have to watch it is when you release GPL'd code and accept patches back. You don't own those patches, and they are GPL'd to you. Accepting patches is a problem if you want to distribute ABC later.
GPL licenses do not. Essentialy I write GPL software and I cannot use it in any commercial projects.
If you wrote it, then it's yours, and you can do whatever the hell you want with it. Even if you release code as GPL, you can also stick it in commercial products without GPL'ing them. Other people can't, but you can as you own the copyright on that code.
Unless you're planning on suing yourself for GPL violations, that is.
Anybody who comes back and submits patches to you is creating a derivative work and releasing it back to you under the GPL. So you can't use other people's patches to your work in commercial products in that case. A BSD license would avoid this but would also let anybody else use the code commercially without forcing them to release the changes they made.
Microsoft AntiSpyware identifies iSearch as a threat too. Pops up a warning in big red colors when you try to install it, if you have AntiSpyware doing real-time monitoring.
So, is iDownload beginning proceedings against Microsoft too? Or are they just sending out C&D's without actually backing them up? Sort of a hopeful C&D..
The real answer to inane C&D's like these is to ignore them. Anybody can send a C&D for anything. If they actually want to take it to court, then let 'em. They'd lose, they know it, so don't worry about it.
There were some interesting music industry facts in the NewYorker. The RIAA labels make money on about 300 album of to 10000 or so they put out a year. Almost all bands major label albums are money loosing investments, and the money fronted to artist to make an album is lost.(pro recording / mixing isn't cheap, although we'll see the first apple/garageband recorded album this year)
Like most "interesting facts" in the world, those are wrong. If it wasn't profitable to make an album, then those albums wouldn't be made. Simple as that. They make money on the vast majority of albums and then screw the artist by use of creative accounting practices.
My suggestion if you really want artists to make money:
1. Go find the artist's webpage and look for some kind of mailing address. Might be a fan club, might be the address of their webmaster, but it'll very likely be someone that can forward your letter to them. Email them to make sure if you're uncertain.
2. Write a letter explaining that you downloaded their music online because you felt that paying whatever the hell the price was for it when you knew they'd only see a few cents from that price was unfair. Wrap the letter around a $10 bill, or whatever you feel the album is worth.
You're right, we disagree and will never agree on this point, because, as I see it, to forcefully change culture is to pass a law stating that half the programming must be French, or to have a national language, or to essentially legally discriminate because of culture in some form or another. Which is exactly what the French do. So does Canada to a lesser extent.
If you'd have bothered to read the editorial, you'd find that "attack" is perhaps not the most appropriate word to use.
If you had bothered to read it yourself, you'd find that it is.
Rather, M. Jeanneney calls on his own country to get its act together and do the same sort of thing as Google for the sake of keeping the Internet from becoming even more of a monoculture than it is today. What, exactly, is so bad about that?
Nothing is bad about that in and of itself. However notice that he only suggests that because the alternative he sees won't work and he admits it. See the comparison he draws to post-WWII, when American programming basically dominated the realm of film and television? He suggests that the French imposed quota system was effective and correct, and goes on to point out that such a system wouldn't work on the web.
The fact that the French quota system was total anti-freedom bullshit doesn't seem to have occurred to him. The French have this driving need to prove that they have the best culture or, more often nowadays, to preserve their culture in spite of the fact that nobody likes their culture. Look, when you have to artifically keep your culture, and even your language, alive through forceful means, then maybe, just maybe, it's time for it to die off already. If French culture is in danger of being overrun by other cultures, then perhaps that's a good thing. Stagnation is death.
He's not attacking Google. His main point is "look at what Google is doing--we should be doing the same thing, for the sake of preserving our culture!"
True, he's not attacking Google, but he is attacking American cultural "domination". The problem here is that culture is in the minds of a people. If they change their minds, then the culture changes too. I submit that forcefully preventing such change is neither desireable nor necessary.
Can the inflammatory headline. It's designed to get a cheap rise out of simple-minded people, and it doesn't make Slashdot look good. There's nothing wrong with what this guy is saying--and if he's attacking anybody, it's his own countrymen, not Google.
Inflammatory headlines are well deserved when the other guy is being a prick. And an annoying French prick at that.
The vast majority of those freezers you see in stores are standalone units, which do exhaust the waste heat into the store itself. The ones on the back wall, in the meat sections, sometimes do indeed shove the heat outside somehow, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
You know what I really want from a shopping experience ?
I go in , i put the items in the cart, i unpack, pack and pay and just leave... no questions, no blaring adverts no constant changing of locations and product layout and no annoying after purchase snail mail spam......
Come to the US. We'll tolerate a lot of shit around here, but being hassled in the grocery store isn't really one of them.
Seriously, if a grocery store asked me all the stuff you're talking about, I'd walk away and leave my stuff lying there for them to deal with.
Best Buy (electronics warehouse type of store in the US) has been trying to pull that sort of thing lately. First they ask if you want to use the Best Buy card. Then they ask if you want AOL CD's or Earthlink or some damn thing like that. Last time I went they asked me if I wanted to subscribe to free magazines. I have not gone back and will not go back until they stop that sort of thing. I mean, hell, I can buy the stuff off the internet for as cheap as that, with none of the hassle.
Grocery stores are very reluctant to do that sort of thing around here. It's only been a couple years or so since self-checkout lines were introduced more or less nationwide in every store, and those have been around for ages. It'll be at least another 3-4 years or so before everybody has their own type of credit card, and hopefully we'll have internet grocery ordering really working right by then and can stop going grocery shopping as well.
Except for California. They're as bad as you state your experience is, except they have valet parking. So just avoid California.:)
I've been all over the country, and this is the first I've heard of these.
Self-checkout lines are nothing new. If that's what you're talking about, those are everywhere.
But the article is talking about a device mounted on the cart with a barcode scanner. You scan the items as you add them to the cart and get a running total, as well as not having to actually wait in line to check out at the front of the store. You've already scanned everything, so it just uploads that to the register and charges you for it.
These are new, as far as I know. If they have them in SC, then you're the only ones to have them.
Did you actually believe that no late fees meant you could just keep the movie forever free of charge? A femtogram of common sense would have saved you this embarassment.
Of course nobody thought that, but at the same time, they shouldn't say something in their ads that is clearly not true. Just changing the timeframe and renaming it to "restocking fee" doesn't change that it is, in fact, a late fee.
Bring it back more than 7 days late and they charge you a late fee, no matter WTF they call it.
I think you missed the point. Regardless of how strong the encryption is, at some point you have to be able to actually hear the damn music. Meaning that at that moment, you will have everything needed to decrypt the song. Encryption key, encrypted data, algorithim. Because without the ability to decrypt the thing, you can't possibly be listening to it.
and your second argument is exactly the same as I brought up - it costs way too much to extract the key from the actual black box chips.
Define "cost"... Because while I may not have this sort of equipment lying around, somebody does somewhere. And for them the cost is effectively zero, as they're just spending their own hobby time to do it.
The simplest DRM you can postulate is for the player to have an encryption key built into it (thus hard to get at) and the song to be encrypted. This means that the song will only be playable on that player. Yes, this is hard, but it's also not a particularly user-friendly way to go, which is why they never do that sort of thing.
The requirements for effective DRM and the requirements for actually making a product people will buy are in conflict. Thus a truly effective DRM would not sell well.
As I've already written, only because we found bugs in their crypto implementation. If those hadn't been there, you would've needed the private key.
Bunk. The bugs were used because that was easier and more effective, but if it came right down to it, you could simply replace the public key on the device with a key of your own choosing by simply burning a replacement ROM chip or whatever. With a different public key, one that you do know the matching private key to, it could be hacked.
Again, the *only* reason you need the private key is to make things work with the public key that is already in the device.
Slashdot Mirror
I expected that everybody on /. would know of DNA already. Citing is unnecessary when you're talking about the greats. ;)
"In an engine you break the gasoline into millions of pieces and then ignite them in a chamber, making a controlled explosion. You do that continuously in your car," Xu said. "A higher gas pressure might do a better job of breaking the fuel into smaller, more uniform pieces. But determining that would require further experiments more accurately simulating the splash process as it occurs under fuel-combustion conditions," he said.
What do you call it when the cop gives you a kilo of grass, tells you it's free, then busts you for having it?
Or closer to this case: If somebody comes up and hands me a bunch of weed for free, then goes and gets a cop and tells them I have weed, and the cop comes and busts me?
Basically, somebody gave the guy servers and loaded warez onto them, then told the cops to bust the man. You can't tell me that's right. I may not know the legal terminology here, but it still ain't right nevertheless.
Now the world has gone to bed,
Darkness won't engulf my head,
I can see by infrared,
How I hate the night.
I've been doing work recently with a digital signature capture system on a PDA type of device. The signatures it captures are *very* good. The weird thing though is the response time is delayed, so you don't actually see the signature as you write it. However, it captures it all, and the resulting printout has some kind of funky pressure algorithim applied to it so that harder pressed spots are darker and the whole thing has a slight smoothing applied to it.
In any case, it is impressive on the printout, just not on the screen as you do it.
Might as well go hit the Crab Shack and get some fresh seafood.
I'll be out that way next week for St. Pats. This'll be the first year I'm not actually staying out on Tybee for Patty's.
You might be right, IANAL either.
However, if it were to keep him from holding them in contempt, then his judgement for them to reveal the sources really wouldn't have a whole lot of force behind it. They could just blow it off, more or less.
What makes someone a journalist? Is it circulation in the millions? Is it a press pass? Is it a crumpled fedora? These days any hack with a blog can wrap something in HTML, slap a google ad on it, and call it journalism. Does that make it so?
Yes, yes it does.
The very word itself defines what it is: Journalist = someone who writes a journal.
This isn't rocket science here. Freedom of speech means exactly what it says. I can start up a way to communicate to the people and communicate anything I damn well please. Nobody can stop me from doing it. This is the very backbone of freedom of speech.
I don't need to have a mass market. I don't need to have financial backing. Ben Franklin started with a single printing press, you know.
The only limitations you can place on such free speech are those of truth. Slander isn't allowed, for example. If you're going to talk shit about somebody, you better make sure that it's true. Truth is the ultimate defense for the journalist in this respect.
Does everything written to a wiki or a blog get full first amendment protection
Everything written anywhere gets full First Amendment protection. Period. Not too difficult to grasp here.
However, I consider it a matter of fact to be decided by the courts whether a given individual is afforded these protections, as they should never be automatic.
See, that's where we differ. First Amendment protection should be automatic *unless* you can show a valid reason why it does not apply. Showing harm to a person or group of people isn't good enough, you have to show why such protections in any given case are detrimental to society as a whole. I can show that shouting Fire in a theater is dangerous to those people in that theater and to society as a whole if it were to be allowed, so therefore it doesn't get 1A protection. That's the reasoning that should be used: 1A is automatic unless you can explain why it should not be.
There is no federal law to protect sources.
True. Good thing this is being tried in California, where there is the "Shield Law" written into the California constitution, IIRC.
Does it have to be?
Does it have to be just a television program? Can't it grow into something more? Can't it be a movement? Can't it be a means to spreading a message of hope and logic and tolerance?
Thus begins the first steps toward the Church of Trek.
...when they're using cryptographic methods and not giving you the public keys to be able to send the audio to the device yourself?
iTunes had to be hacked to obtain the public keys to be able to send audio to the device. Open protocols can be used to lock devices down too, you know.
I'm curious how they pulled this off. Does the iTunes Sharing protocol (DAAP) support file upload? Or are they pushing the music in some other way?
You run a client on the machine with iTunes. When you hit "Sync" in the client, it talks to the server, copies the files to the local machine, then uses iTunes COM interface to add the files into the iTunes Library.
Basically it syncs iTunes to the server in the same basic way that the iPod can sync to iTunes.
There was also some speculation as to how consumers could deal with this.
Mainly, they can sue. It's called price-discrimination, and it's illegal.
Now, proving it using the Robinson-Patman Act (1936) is not the easiest thing in the world to do. There's loads of exceptions, sort of thing. But nevertheless, public outcry and a highly public case against the first person who tried this sort of thing would likely be enough to put a stop to it.
Amazon.com tried something like this several years back, didn't they? Different customers got different prices. They dumped it, I think, because of all the attention it got when people noticed it happening.
Can management remain happy by keeping their baby to themselves, or would GPL require that the source to 'a' be made available?
If this code is all purely internal, and you're not distributing it outside the company, then you can do essentially whatever you want. The GPL only really covers distribution in that respect. It does have some words about modification of GPL'd code, but nothing there requires you to release or distribute your modifications to other people.
The above assumes someone else wrote 'b' and 'c'. How would the scenario change if I wrote 'b' and 'c'? Would it then be possible to keep management happy, and if so what would the licensing structure be?
If you wrote B and C, and don't have some clause where all your work is owned by the company, then it's a different matter. You own the copyright, so you can do essentially whatever the hell you want. If the company owns the copyright, then you'd have to convince them to release B and C as GPL instead.
But essentially, the owner of a piece of code can do anything they damn well please. The only catch here is in accepting patches back from other people. If you release a piece of code as GPL and somebody makes a patch, then they have created a derivative work and it's under the GPL now with respect to you. So you can't take those patches and then shove them back into something you're doing. Oh, you can if the ABC software is only distributed internally, you just can't relicense those patches under any other type of licensing scheme.
The point here is that if ABC is something you only use internally anyway, then it makes little difference what the licensing scheme on the code is. You just can't come back and distribute ABC later. If distributing ABC as a whole is a possibility, then licensing matters, but assuming all of ABC was written by people in the company or by you or what have you, then it doesn't matter all that much. You're hardly likely to sue yourself for violation of your license.
The only case where you have to watch it is when you release GPL'd code and accept patches back. You don't own those patches, and they are GPL'd to you. Accepting patches is a problem if you want to distribute ABC later.
GPL licenses do not. Essentialy I write GPL software and I cannot use it in any commercial projects.
If you wrote it, then it's yours, and you can do whatever the hell you want with it. Even if you release code as GPL, you can also stick it in commercial products without GPL'ing them. Other people can't, but you can as you own the copyright on that code.
Unless you're planning on suing yourself for GPL violations, that is.
Anybody who comes back and submits patches to you is creating a derivative work and releasing it back to you under the GPL. So you can't use other people's patches to your work in commercial products in that case. A BSD license would avoid this but would also let anybody else use the code commercially without forcing them to release the changes they made.
Microsoft AntiSpyware identifies iSearch as a threat too. Pops up a warning in big red colors when you try to install it, if you have AntiSpyware doing real-time monitoring.
So, is iDownload beginning proceedings against Microsoft too? Or are they just sending out C&D's without actually backing them up? Sort of a hopeful C&D..
The real answer to inane C&D's like these is to ignore them. Anybody can send a C&D for anything. If they actually want to take it to court, then let 'em. They'd lose, they know it, so don't worry about it.
There were some interesting music industry facts in the NewYorker. The RIAA labels make money on about 300 album of to 10000 or so they put out a year. Almost all bands major label albums are money loosing investments, and the money fronted to artist to make an album is lost.(pro recording / mixing isn't cheap, although we'll see the first apple/garageband recorded album this year)
Like most "interesting facts" in the world, those are wrong. If it wasn't profitable to make an album, then those albums wouldn't be made. Simple as that. They make money on the vast majority of albums and then screw the artist by use of creative accounting practices.
My suggestion if you really want artists to make money:
1. Go find the artist's webpage and look for some kind of mailing address. Might be a fan club, might be the address of their webmaster, but it'll very likely be someone that can forward your letter to them. Email them to make sure if you're uncertain.
2. Write a letter explaining that you downloaded their music online because you felt that paying whatever the hell the price was for it when you knew they'd only see a few cents from that price was unfair. Wrap the letter around a $10 bill, or whatever you feel the album is worth.
3. Mail it.
4. The artists profit.
You're right, we disagree and will never agree on this point, because, as I see it, to forcefully change culture is to pass a law stating that half the programming must be French, or to have a national language, or to essentially legally discriminate because of culture in some form or another. Which is exactly what the French do. So does Canada to a lesser extent.
What? As opposed to forcefully stimulating that change, which is both desireable and necessary, I suppose?
No. Going to the other extreme is no good either.
How about simply *not preventing* such changes that occur naturally. This is indeed desireable and necessary.
If you'd have bothered to read the editorial, you'd find that "attack" is perhaps not the most appropriate word to use.
If you had bothered to read it yourself, you'd find that it is.
Rather, M. Jeanneney calls on his own country to get its act together and do the same sort of thing as Google for the sake of keeping the Internet from becoming even more of a monoculture than it is today. What, exactly, is so bad about that?
Nothing is bad about that in and of itself. However notice that he only suggests that because the alternative he sees won't work and he admits it. See the comparison he draws to post-WWII, when American programming basically dominated the realm of film and television? He suggests that the French imposed quota system was effective and correct, and goes on to point out that such a system wouldn't work on the web.
The fact that the French quota system was total anti-freedom bullshit doesn't seem to have occurred to him. The French have this driving need to prove that they have the best culture or, more often nowadays, to preserve their culture in spite of the fact that nobody likes their culture. Look, when you have to artifically keep your culture, and even your language, alive through forceful means, then maybe, just maybe, it's time for it to die off already. If French culture is in danger of being overrun by other cultures, then perhaps that's a good thing. Stagnation is death.
He's not attacking Google. His main point is "look at what Google is doing--we should be doing the same thing, for the sake of preserving our culture!"
True, he's not attacking Google, but he is attacking American cultural "domination". The problem here is that culture is in the minds of a people. If they change their minds, then the culture changes too. I submit that forcefully preventing such change is neither desireable nor necessary.
Can the inflammatory headline. It's designed to get a cheap rise out of simple-minded people, and it doesn't make Slashdot look good. There's nothing wrong with what this guy is saying--and if he's attacking anybody, it's his own countrymen, not Google.
Inflammatory headlines are well deserved when the other guy is being a prick. And an annoying French prick at that.
The vast majority of those freezers you see in stores are standalone units, which do exhaust the waste heat into the store itself. The ones on the back wall, in the meat sections, sometimes do indeed shove the heat outside somehow, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
You know what I really want from a shopping experience ?
... no questions, no blaring adverts no constant changing of locations and product layout and no annoying after purchase snail mail spam ......
:)
I go in , i put the items in the cart, i unpack, pack and pay and just leave
Come to the US. We'll tolerate a lot of shit around here, but being hassled in the grocery store isn't really one of them.
Seriously, if a grocery store asked me all the stuff you're talking about, I'd walk away and leave my stuff lying there for them to deal with.
Best Buy (electronics warehouse type of store in the US) has been trying to pull that sort of thing lately. First they ask if you want to use the Best Buy card. Then they ask if you want AOL CD's or Earthlink or some damn thing like that. Last time I went they asked me if I wanted to subscribe to free magazines. I have not gone back and will not go back until they stop that sort of thing. I mean, hell, I can buy the stuff off the internet for as cheap as that, with none of the hassle.
Grocery stores are very reluctant to do that sort of thing around here. It's only been a couple years or so since self-checkout lines were introduced more or less nationwide in every store, and those have been around for ages. It'll be at least another 3-4 years or so before everybody has their own type of credit card, and hopefully we'll have internet grocery ordering really working right by then and can stop going grocery shopping as well.
Except for California. They're as bad as you state your experience is, except they have valet parking. So just avoid California.
I've been all over the country, and this is the first I've heard of these.
Self-checkout lines are nothing new. If that's what you're talking about, those are everywhere.
But the article is talking about a device mounted on the cart with a barcode scanner. You scan the items as you add them to the cart and get a running total, as well as not having to actually wait in line to check out at the front of the store. You've already scanned everything, so it just uploads that to the register and charges you for it.
These are new, as far as I know. If they have them in SC, then you're the only ones to have them.
Did you actually believe that no late fees meant you could just keep the movie forever free of charge? A femtogram of common sense would have saved you this embarassment.
Of course nobody thought that, but at the same time, they shouldn't say something in their ads that is clearly not true. Just changing the timeframe and renaming it to "restocking fee" doesn't change that it is, in fact, a late fee.
Bring it back more than 7 days late and they charge you a late fee, no matter WTF they call it.
The encryption is too strong,
I think you missed the point. Regardless of how strong the encryption is, at some point you have to be able to actually hear the damn music. Meaning that at that moment, you will have everything needed to decrypt the song. Encryption key, encrypted data, algorithim. Because without the ability to decrypt the thing, you can't possibly be listening to it.
and your second argument is exactly the same as I brought up - it costs way too much to extract the key from the actual black box chips.
Define "cost"... Because while I may not have this sort of equipment lying around, somebody does somewhere. And for them the cost is effectively zero, as they're just spending their own hobby time to do it.
The simplest DRM you can postulate is for the player to have an encryption key built into it (thus hard to get at) and the song to be encrypted. This means that the song will only be playable on that player. Yes, this is hard, but it's also not a particularly user-friendly way to go, which is why they never do that sort of thing.
The requirements for effective DRM and the requirements for actually making a product people will buy are in conflict. Thus a truly effective DRM would not sell well.
As I've already written, only because we found bugs in their crypto implementation. If those hadn't been there, you would've needed the private key.
Bunk. The bugs were used because that was easier and more effective, but if it came right down to it, you could simply replace the public key on the device with a key of your own choosing by simply burning a replacement ROM chip or whatever. With a different public key, one that you do know the matching private key to, it could be hacked.
Again, the *only* reason you need the private key is to make things work with the public key that is already in the device.
And also, this is still not "DRM".