Step 7: Between driver updates, firmware updates, windows upgrades and media upgrades remove the 'easily circumventable' part.
If they could, they would. However, they can't. Technically impossible with current hardware. The whole idea is more than a bit silly, really. There's only 2 ways to copy protect a CD while letting it play in a normal audio CD player:
1. Software trickery - Just putting software onto a data track and then relying on a computer to run it is always trivally defeated... Tell the computer to not run the software. It can't do anything if it doesn't run.
2. Exploiting of the CD Standards - You can exploit the edge cases of the differences between data CD readers and audio CD readers (some of which has been attempted to date), but you always end up with false positives because the differences between those two items is eroding. Is that portable MP3-CD player a data device or an audio device? It's an audio device in that it can only play audio, but it's a data device in that it can read data tracks for the MP3 part of MP3-CD's. Lot of car CD players are the same way. So are all DVD players that can play CD's. So when you try to lock out CD-ROM drives, you lock these out too, and tick off your customers. Not to mention ticking off Philips, who owns the CD format.
If it auto-installed without asking, then maybe. Depends on the legalese on the liner notes.
But it does ask, as I hear it. And if you're using a Mac or Linux or something, I don't think they included any software on it for those systems.
To me, this sort of thing totally undermines their argument for preventing copyright infringment. They put software on the disc that only prevents people from doing legit and reasonable things with the content of the CD. People wanting to commit copyright infringment don't even get bit by this software. They hit cancel or have autorun disabled, and can rip/encode/distribute the contents of the CD just fine.
How are you preventing copyright infringement when you're only putting roadblocks in front of people who are not actually wanting to commit copyright infringement? Makes no sense to me.
You bougth something, expecting it to be a standard CD. (reasonable, given that the copy-protection is typically poorly marked, and the CDs stacked up on racks intermixed with the non-CDs) That is, you gave away money, reasonably expecting to get a CD for it that would play in any machine capable of playing CDs.
Well, in point of fact, these new Velvet Revolver CD's *ARE* standard CD's. They conform to the Blue Book Standard for hybrid CD Audio/Data discs. They'll play in any CD player, even that MP3-CD player.
The only copy protection here is a data track with some software and an autorun. Install the software, it fucks with your CD drivers when you try to rip. That's it. Hold SHIFT to bypass, or disable the autorun, or when the screen comes up that says "An upgrade is required", hit Cancel. Yes, you can actually *cancel* the installation on this sucker.
So as far as the record exec thinking that people approve of CD Protection mechanisms, maybe he means that people approve of easily disabled protection mechanisms.;-)
As a matter of fact, who would trust their credit card number to travel through a peer-to-peer network to get to the company he/she's ordering from? And this is just money... how about food as mentioned in the article? Why do you trust servers/routers that your number passes through now over the internet?
Answer: You don't. You use some form of end to end encryption (https).
As far as the food thing goes, I think he was making a point. I'm not eating anybody's leftovers except my own anytime soon.;)
(And yes indeed, I am not a native speaker so I am not sure how you say "ingenious ergonome" in U[KS]glish)
Ingenious = no problem.
Ergonome = Huh? Only thing I can think of is "somebody who makes things ergonomic", but there is no such word in English, really. From context, I assume you mean like a person who develops a good user interface or something like that. However, again, that's a "no such word" situation. Unless you want to go with "user interface designer".
Verizon lied to you. DSL will work without a dial tone. They can hook it to a naked pair just fine. The problem is a bureaucractic one, not technological one.
Note that having "dial tone" is something of a misnomer nowadays. Most places will have dial tone whether you have a phone line hooked up there or not. It'll only call 911/other emergency numbers and the local phone companies (so you can call to get service), but it'll have tone.
DSL will work without tone though. All that's needed is a short enough wire pair between you and your CO.
But how hard would it be, for example, for thirteen well co-ordinated individuals who can physically get to the locations of these servers to deliberately cause widespread disruption for everyone who relies on DNS? Or if software was the weapon of choice, how hard would it be for a group of people to DDoS the networks housing the servers?
Yes, but you can scale your imagination to anything here. What if there were 50? 100? 1000? No matter how much you scale it, one well coordinated attack could take them all out given enough time, effort, planning, etc.
But the point wasn't that it can't be done, the point was that it can't be *easily* done. That's what "no single point of failure" means. You gotta take out all of them, not just take out one of them.
Each root is robust in and of itself too, as somebody else pointed out here. But again, it's beside the point. The root-servers are not a single point of failure. That's all I was saying.
True, but that's beside the point. There's only 13 visible entities to the world. If those entities fail, then they fail. Consider it as a black box thing. Each root entity has it's own level of robustness, but if it fails, for whatever reason, then it fails. We don't care about the internal workings of each one, because we only have 13 black boxes to talk to. a.root-servers.org, b.root-servers.org, etc, etc.
In this case, Akamai had some sort of major issue. Okay, fine. Fair enough.
But the root servers themselves are a bad example to point to for a "single point of failure". They're not. The root servers, by themselves, are very robust, widely scattered, and any one of them can, in theory, handle the whole load. Admittedly, for the root, that load ain't a heck of a lot by comparison.
Now, the DNS system itself has several thousand single points of failure, depending on how you define failure. Like you said, all.com traffic goes to Verisign's control, etc, etc.
The root servers, however, are not one of these points of failure. They do what they were meant to do.. to be the root DNS servers. Several can fail and the root lives on.
It's not truely decentralized... The root nameservers are the most obvious example...
The most obvious example? The fact is that there are 13 of them, in widely scattered locations across the globe, and it's not decentralized?
Damn man, what exactly would you consider "decentralized" then?
Root servers go down all the time. It's not particularly unusual. There's THIRTEEN of the things. Up to 8 have been down at once with no major effects on the network, IIRC.
Some of them seem to think that its wrong to give fake information, or that you may be tracked down or something. people need to be educated about this stuff!
If they could track you down that easily, why would they be asking for your information in the first place?
You're right, really, people just don't think much, do they? I agree... people need to be told about this sort of thing. I was doing some searching with my dad a few weeks ago for something fairly esoteric, and ran into a registration using his machine. Since I was searching for him, he immediately started giving answers to me for the questions on the screen. I had to stop a moment and ask him why he was answering these questions. He didn't have any ready answer for me.
So that got me into the whole "how much junk mail do you get" and "there's a reason you get 100 spam emails a day, you know" speech. Then I proceeded to fill in fake info to the registration screen, and you could see the lightbulb turn on in his head. It simply had never occurred to him to use fake data or how/where companies get information for junk mail and spam and such.
I admit that it took a bit of time to explain how companies (some, not all) sold this data in bulk to other people, who sold it to other people, and so on and so forth, until some scumbag who emails you ads for viagra or cicalis from mexico gets a hold of it. He couldn't believe that a company would sell data like that. Most people never think about this sort of thing. Frankly, I think that a lot of people aren't comfortable with the idea that information has value. It's like the fact that you can actually SELL INFORMATION simply doesn't register in their minds. Maybe, being computer geeks, we're more used to this concept or something. I don't know for sure.
It's quite illegal to sell the devkits to the public.
Where? Is it illegal in Hong Kong, where this guy is? Do you know, for a fact, that he didn't obtain these devices legitimately and/or without signing any type of agreement? Hell, for all you know he dumpster dove for the things.
A sticker on the bottom of thing marked "Property of Sony" has no legal force whatsoever. They could have trashed the thing and he obtained it from the garbage, which makes it now his, legally, and with no restrictions whatsoever.
Without knowing the complete and full path by which he acquired that devkit, you cannot say for certain whether it is illegal for him to be selling it.
It's roughly 50% compression, so around 700 Kbits/sec seems about right. That's what they're using for the new Airport Express thing. iTunes compresses the audio output into the ALAC codec and sends it to the Airport Express for output on the stereo.
Still a bit high for bluetooth, but within the realm of possibility.
If writing "decently optimized" code takes you any extra time at all , then you have other issues.
I'm not saying to go and make everything run as fast as freakin' possible. I'm saying to not be stupid and write code that is easy to read and understand but is also just plain slow as hell. You *can* write both readable and "fast enough" code in one pass. Any good programmer does it on a regular basis.
if that bottleneck was clearly written it will likely be much easier to refactor/optimize
If you have to come back to code a year down the road to optimize it because it's more performance critical than you thought, you already fucked up. This stuff should be visible in the design phase, if you're doing any forward thinking at all. You should always ask yourself "how will this scale?" when writing anything that has the possibility of getting larger down the road, that's all I'm saying here.
It took me a long time to get over the notion that every program should be as efficient and fast as I could make it.
Where did I say that was a good idea anyway? I'm *NOT* saying to make every program as fast as it can be. I'm just saying to not make programs as slow as they can be, all in the name of "readability". Too often have I seen good coding practices sacrificed because somebody thinks that this or that *OBVIOUSLY* bad code is easier to understand or read.
Readability of code is a matter of opinion, because different people have different skill levels of reading code. It's just a fact. For any given chunk of code, there's a hell of a lot of ways to do it, and all I'm asking is to not pick the stupid ones simply because they are easier to read. Pick the smarter ones that are almost as easy to read instead.
SO WHAT! Programs should only be optimized if: 1) the program is doing stuff so intensive that it runs slow or 2) It is being run all the time in the background by the system and can slow down the system as a whole. 98% of the time it just does not matter.
I agree with points 1 and 2, however, if you're doing any non-trivial programming, I wholeheartedly disagree with the 98% figure. Not every bit of code is a throw-away piece. If your code only runs occassionally, and it's not performance critical, then yes, make readability your main priority.
But a lot of times your code is performance critical, or at least will be in the future. Code has this tendancy to stick around once it's actually working. Too often have I seen code that, when it was written, was not getting used a lot. It worked, so nobody thought anything of it. As they scaled the system up, that code became a major bottleneck and eventually somebody had to go back and optimize the hell out of it, or simply throw it out and rewrite it to be fast.
It's good to write readable code. But it's also good to write code that is reasonably optimized at the same time. No need to go to extremes, just don't do stupid things like passing around huge 4 kilobyte variables to functions and such (example I've seen). Pass a pointer instead. Or a reference. Just write smart code. You can still make readable code while making it optimal enough to scale pretty well. Only very, very rarely do you have something that needs to be super well optimized, and then you usually are better off writing the critical sections in machine code anyway.
Easilly readable code is FAR MORE IMPORTANT.
Easy readability is far more important when that code scales to the level you need it to scale to. Readable code that doesn't actually work in the system you're trying to put it in is worse than useless.
Are you really incapable of seeing where this is going?
No, I saw perfectly well where he was going with it. The idea of automation for most any process isn't exactly new.
However, think about it from a cost/benefit perspective. Where's the gain? They get all this data on every person and can produce reports for any one of them, but still somebody has to go through those reports. You simply can't take human analysis out of the loop entirely.
Say that "they" had a complete sheet on every person's public activities. I agree that there is a great potential, even a likelihood, of abuse of such a system, but the costs involved in creating such a system are truly staggering. More traditional methods of investigation are far cheaper, more accurate, and more likely to produce results. The computer can't analyse motivations, it can only record and correlate actions.
While I agree that there's an issue, it still doesn't sound likely for this to become a problem. Not that we shouldn't be concerned about advances in that direction, but let's temper our concerns with a bit of common sense, okay?
Do you suppose for just a moment that you might feel like you're privacy had been invaded if this hypothetical situation were to happen?
Let's think about this a moment. It's fine to propose possible hypotheticals, and you can make it sound pretty bad by listing the potential for such a system. But what would it take to actually implement such a system? Essentially it would take somebody specifically following your movements and your actions. Are you that important? Does anybody actually do that to you? It's easy to come up with scenarios that sound like invasions of privacy, but it's hard to actually implement those scenarios. Cameras watching for criminal behavior don't help you to do any of this, not really. You still need somebody to watch what those cameras see.
These are placed in public areas, right? In public, you have no expectation of privacy. Admittedly, it sounds like the threat of terrorism is being used to justify the cameras, which is stupid as hell, but the reality is that these are more likely to catch smaller crimes and such, and will probably be used in that way.
And as far as that goes, I see no reason why they should broadcast an unencrypted signal that anybody at all can watch. They're in public locations, they're paid for with the public dollar, the public should be able to see what they see. Open it up.
You want privacy? Go home. Until they start putting cameras in your apartment, at which point I'll understand your complaining.
People would only be able to copy your songs on the local subnet though. I can see how this is some kind of problem in a dorm or something, but for most people it's not a huge issue.
There was no indication that the letter he received from the US ISP was a generic one.
Umm.. the letter *itself* said it was a generic one. I'll quote it.. Also, I believe he forgot to XXX out a few instances of the ISP name. It seems to have, in fact, been Lycos.
Hello Peter, 9/8/03 I am writing in response to your e-mail regarding content hosted through xxxxx on one of our free homepage services. You should understand that the content to which you have referred have has been stored on the Lycos system solely at the direction of a xxxx user and has not been initially reviewed, monitored, or edited by xxxx employees. xxxx users bear sole responsibility for such material, and xxxx Inc. has no knowledge of the specific contents of member directories. Xxx Inc. fully complies with all intellectual property laws. In particular, when the owner of an exclusive right is concerned that this right is infringed by material placed on a provider's system or network by a subscriber of that provider the Digital Millennium Copyright Act "DMCA") provides certain procedures to ensure that infringing materials are removed without wrongfully injuring the subscriber or unduly burdening the provider. In such instances, the owner of an exclusive right should send to the provider a notification containing the following information: 1. A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed. 2. Precise identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online sites are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site. 3. Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material including exact URL's and references to specific files. 4. Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, and electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted. 5. A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. 22 6. A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right is allegedly infringed. You have not provided all of the information required above.If you are able to provide the missing information, please submit an appropriate notification meeting all of the above requirements to Lycos Inc.'s registered agent for receiving such notifications: Registered Copyright Agent xxxxxx Upon receipt of a proper notification, xxxx Inc. will respond expeditiously to remove or disable access to the materials properly identified in the notification. xxxxx will provide a copy of the notification to the subscriber and give the subscriber an opportunity to respond. This letter is written without prejudice to any right, remedy, or defense that xxxxx may have which has not been asserted in this letter. All such rights, remedies, and defenses are expressly reserved. If you have any questions about this letter, please do not hesitate to contact xxxxx registered agent. For legal advice, you should consult an attorney. Sincerely, Xxxxx Hello Peter, The set of guidelines that you received are sent to all persons claiming copyright infringement. I apologize for the dry nature of this procedure, but this is necessary in order for us to address your concerns as quickly as possible while adhering to DMCA law. Please pa
So which would you rather? Having to remove a tag, or having no iTMS to begin with?
Frankly, I don't give a shit whether the iTMS is there or not. If they don't want to sell music to me online, then I'll simply get it from P2P systems like I did before.
Here's the deal. The RIAA has no leverage power. Yes, they have the music, but I, the customer, have the cash. If they don't want to sell to me, fuck 'em. I'll obtain my music some other way. If they try to make a more restrictive service, fuck 'em, I'll either bypass their restrictions when they get in my way, or I'll go back to the P2P systems and they won't get a dime out of me.
You act as if they have the power in this situation. They don't. If the DRM gets too annoying, people will go back to not paying for music. It's real simple. If they want my money, they have to not piss me off too much for me to hand it over. Easy as that.
Lawsuits don't scare me. They've "sued" less than 2000 people. There's 50 million file sharers. Seems like good odds, in my book. They can't sue everybody.
If you're sending encoded music out the bluetooth connection, then you'd need a decoder on the other end. The guy was talking about sending audio to headphones, not sending encoded streams.
Slashdot Mirror
Step 7: Between driver updates, firmware updates, windows upgrades and media upgrades remove the 'easily circumventable' part.
If they could, they would. However, they can't. Technically impossible with current hardware. The whole idea is more than a bit silly, really. There's only 2 ways to copy protect a CD while letting it play in a normal audio CD player:
1. Software trickery - Just putting software onto a data track and then relying on a computer to run it is always trivally defeated... Tell the computer to not run the software. It can't do anything if it doesn't run.
2. Exploiting of the CD Standards - You can exploit the edge cases of the differences between data CD readers and audio CD readers (some of which has been attempted to date), but you always end up with false positives because the differences between those two items is eroding. Is that portable MP3-CD player a data device or an audio device? It's an audio device in that it can only play audio, but it's a data device in that it can read data tracks for the MP3 part of MP3-CD's. Lot of car CD players are the same way. So are all DVD players that can play CD's. So when you try to lock out CD-ROM drives, you lock these out too, and tick off your customers. Not to mention ticking off Philips, who owns the CD format.
If it auto-installed without asking, then maybe. Depends on the legalese on the liner notes.
But it does ask, as I hear it. And if you're using a Mac or Linux or something, I don't think they included any software on it for those systems.
To me, this sort of thing totally undermines their argument for preventing copyright infringment. They put software on the disc that only prevents people from doing legit and reasonable things with the content of the CD. People wanting to commit copyright infringment don't even get bit by this software. They hit cancel or have autorun disabled, and can rip/encode/distribute the contents of the CD just fine.
How are you preventing copyright infringement when you're only putting roadblocks in front of people who are not actually wanting to commit copyright infringement? Makes no sense to me.
You bougth something, expecting it to be a standard CD. (reasonable, given that the copy-protection is typically poorly marked, and the CDs stacked up on racks intermixed with the non-CDs) That is, you gave away money, reasonably expecting to get a CD for it that would play in any machine capable of playing CDs.
;-)
Well, in point of fact, these new Velvet Revolver CD's *ARE* standard CD's. They conform to the Blue Book Standard for hybrid CD Audio/Data discs. They'll play in any CD player, even that MP3-CD player.
The only copy protection here is a data track with some software and an autorun. Install the software, it fucks with your CD drivers when you try to rip. That's it. Hold SHIFT to bypass, or disable the autorun, or when the screen comes up that says "An upgrade is required", hit Cancel. Yes, you can actually *cancel* the installation on this sucker.
So as far as the record exec thinking that people approve of CD Protection mechanisms, maybe he means that people approve of easily disabled protection mechanisms.
As a matter of fact, who would trust their credit card number to travel through a peer-to-peer network to get to the company he/she's ordering from? And this is just money... how about food as mentioned in the article?
;)
Why do you trust servers/routers that your number passes through now over the internet?
Answer: You don't. You use some form of end to end encryption (https).
As far as the food thing goes, I think he was making a point. I'm not eating anybody's leftovers except my own anytime soon.
(And yes indeed, I am not a native speaker so I am not sure how you say "ingenious ergonome" in U[KS]glish)
Ingenious = no problem.
Ergonome = Huh? Only thing I can think of is "somebody who makes things ergonomic", but there is no such word in English, really. From context, I assume you mean like a person who develops a good user interface or something like that. However, again, that's a "no such word" situation. Unless you want to go with "user interface designer".
Verizon lied to you. DSL will work without a dial tone. They can hook it to a naked pair just fine. The problem is a bureaucractic one, not technological one.
Note that having "dial tone" is something of a misnomer nowadays. Most places will have dial tone whether you have a phone line hooked up there or not. It'll only call 911/other emergency numbers and the local phone companies (so you can call to get service), but it'll have tone.
DSL will work without tone though. All that's needed is a short enough wire pair between you and your CO.
For minor scratches, Turtle wax has always worked for me to get it working again. Of course, the first thing I do is back the sucker up after that. :)
But how hard would it be, for example, for thirteen well co-ordinated individuals who can physically get to the locations of these servers to deliberately cause widespread disruption for everyone who relies on DNS? Or if software was the weapon of choice, how hard would it be for a group of people to DDoS the networks housing the servers?
Yes, but you can scale your imagination to anything here. What if there were 50? 100? 1000? No matter how much you scale it, one well coordinated attack could take them all out given enough time, effort, planning, etc.
But the point wasn't that it can't be done, the point was that it can't be *easily* done. That's what "no single point of failure" means. You gotta take out all of them, not just take out one of them.
Each root is robust in and of itself too, as somebody else pointed out here. But again, it's beside the point. The root-servers are not a single point of failure. That's all I was saying.
True, but that's beside the point. There's only 13 visible entities to the world. If those entities fail, then they fail. Consider it as a black box thing. Each root entity has it's own level of robustness, but if it fails, for whatever reason, then it fails. We don't care about the internal workings of each one, because we only have 13 black boxes to talk to. a.root-servers.org, b.root-servers.org, etc, etc.
I was only pointing out that his example was bad.
.com traffic goes to Verisign's control, etc, etc.
In this case, Akamai had some sort of major issue. Okay, fine. Fair enough.
But the root servers themselves are a bad example to point to for a "single point of failure". They're not. The root servers, by themselves, are very robust, widely scattered, and any one of them can, in theory, handle the whole load. Admittedly, for the root, that load ain't a heck of a lot by comparison.
Now, the DNS system itself has several thousand single points of failure, depending on how you define failure. Like you said, all
The root servers, however, are not one of these points of failure. They do what they were meant to do.. to be the root DNS servers. Several can fail and the root lives on.
It's not truely decentralized...
The root nameservers are the most obvious example...
The most obvious example? The fact is that there are 13 of them, in widely scattered locations across the globe, and it's not decentralized?
Damn man, what exactly would you consider "decentralized" then?
Root servers go down all the time. It's not particularly unusual. There's THIRTEEN of the things. Up to 8 have been down at once with no major effects on the network, IIRC.
Some of them seem to think that its wrong to give fake information, or that you may be tracked down or something. people need to be educated about this stuff!
If they could track you down that easily, why would they be asking for your information in the first place?
You're right, really, people just don't think much, do they? I agree... people need to be told about this sort of thing. I was doing some searching with my dad a few weeks ago for something fairly esoteric, and ran into a registration using his machine. Since I was searching for him, he immediately started giving answers to me for the questions on the screen. I had to stop a moment and ask him why he was answering these questions. He didn't have any ready answer for me.
So that got me into the whole "how much junk mail do you get" and "there's a reason you get 100 spam emails a day, you know" speech. Then I proceeded to fill in fake info to the registration screen, and you could see the lightbulb turn on in his head. It simply had never occurred to him to use fake data or how/where companies get information for junk mail and spam and such.
I admit that it took a bit of time to explain how companies (some, not all) sold this data in bulk to other people, who sold it to other people, and so on and so forth, until some scumbag who emails you ads for viagra or cicalis from mexico gets a hold of it. He couldn't believe that a company would sell data like that. Most people never think about this sort of thing. Frankly, I think that a lot of people aren't comfortable with the idea that information has value. It's like the fact that you can actually SELL INFORMATION simply doesn't register in their minds. Maybe, being computer geeks, we're more used to this concept or something. I don't know for sure.
It's quite illegal to sell the devkits to the public.
Where? Is it illegal in Hong Kong, where this guy is? Do you know, for a fact, that he didn't obtain these devices legitimately and/or without signing any type of agreement? Hell, for all you know he dumpster dove for the things.
A sticker on the bottom of thing marked "Property of Sony" has no legal force whatsoever. They could have trashed the thing and he obtained it from the garbage, which makes it now his, legally, and with no restrictions whatsoever.
Without knowing the complete and full path by which he acquired that devkit, you cannot say for certain whether it is illegal for him to be selling it.
...or read all of the slashdot posting for a week.
Holy shit, dude. The idea is to get him to do something that's hard, not to actually melt the man's brain.
It's roughly 50% compression, so around 700 Kbits/sec seems about right. That's what they're using for the new Airport Express thing. iTunes compresses the audio output into the ALAC codec and sends it to the Airport Express for output on the stereo.
Still a bit high for bluetooth, but within the realm of possibility.
you spent all that time optimizing
If writing "decently optimized" code takes you any extra time at all , then you have other issues.
I'm not saying to go and make everything run as fast as freakin' possible. I'm saying to not be stupid and write code that is easy to read and understand but is also just plain slow as hell. You *can* write both readable and "fast enough" code in one pass. Any good programmer does it on a regular basis.
if that bottleneck was clearly written it will likely be much easier to refactor/optimize
If you have to come back to code a year down the road to optimize it because it's more performance critical than you thought, you already fucked up. This stuff should be visible in the design phase, if you're doing any forward thinking at all. You should always ask yourself "how will this scale?" when writing anything that has the possibility of getting larger down the road, that's all I'm saying here.
It took me a long time to get over the notion that every program should be as efficient and fast as I could make it.
Where did I say that was a good idea anyway? I'm *NOT* saying to make every program as fast as it can be. I'm just saying to not make programs as slow as they can be, all in the name of "readability". Too often have I seen good coding practices sacrificed because somebody thinks that this or that *OBVIOUSLY* bad code is easier to understand or read.
Readability of code is a matter of opinion, because different people have different skill levels of reading code. It's just a fact. For any given chunk of code, there's a hell of a lot of ways to do it, and all I'm asking is to not pick the stupid ones simply because they are easier to read. Pick the smarter ones that are almost as easy to read instead.
SO WHAT! Programs should only be optimized if:
1) the program is doing stuff so intensive that it runs slow
or
2) It is being run all the time in the background by the system and can slow down the system as a whole.
98% of the time it just does not matter.
I agree with points 1 and 2, however, if you're doing any non-trivial programming, I wholeheartedly disagree with the 98% figure. Not every bit of code is a throw-away piece. If your code only runs occassionally, and it's not performance critical, then yes, make readability your main priority.
But a lot of times your code is performance critical, or at least will be in the future. Code has this tendancy to stick around once it's actually working. Too often have I seen code that, when it was written, was not getting used a lot. It worked, so nobody thought anything of it. As they scaled the system up, that code became a major bottleneck and eventually somebody had to go back and optimize the hell out of it, or simply throw it out and rewrite it to be fast.
It's good to write readable code. But it's also good to write code that is reasonably optimized at the same time. No need to go to extremes, just don't do stupid things like passing around huge 4 kilobyte variables to functions and such (example I've seen). Pass a pointer instead. Or a reference. Just write smart code. You can still make readable code while making it optimal enough to scale pretty well. Only very, very rarely do you have something that needs to be super well optimized, and then you usually are better off writing the critical sections in machine code anyway.
Easilly readable code is FAR MORE IMPORTANT.
Easy readability is far more important when that code scales to the level you need it to scale to. Readable code that doesn't actually work in the system you're trying to put it in is worse than useless.
Are you really incapable of seeing where this is going?
No, I saw perfectly well where he was going with it. The idea of automation for most any process isn't exactly new.
However, think about it from a cost/benefit perspective. Where's the gain? They get all this data on every person and can produce reports for any one of them, but still somebody has to go through those reports. You simply can't take human analysis out of the loop entirely.
Say that "they" had a complete sheet on every person's public activities. I agree that there is a great potential, even a likelihood, of abuse of such a system, but the costs involved in creating such a system are truly staggering. More traditional methods of investigation are far cheaper, more accurate, and more likely to produce results. The computer can't analyse motivations, it can only record and correlate actions.
While I agree that there's an issue, it still doesn't sound likely for this to become a problem. Not that we shouldn't be concerned about advances in that direction, but let's temper our concerns with a bit of common sense, okay?
Do you suppose for just a moment that you might feel like you're privacy had been invaded if this hypothetical situation were to happen?
Let's think about this a moment. It's fine to propose possible hypotheticals, and you can make it sound pretty bad by listing the potential for such a system. But what would it take to actually implement such a system? Essentially it would take somebody specifically following your movements and your actions. Are you that important? Does anybody actually do that to you?
It's easy to come up with scenarios that sound like invasions of privacy, but it's hard to actually implement those scenarios. Cameras watching for criminal behavior don't help you to do any of this, not really. You still need somebody to watch what those cameras see.
These are placed in public areas, right? In public, you have no expectation of privacy. Admittedly, it sounds like the threat of terrorism is being used to justify the cameras, which is stupid as hell, but the reality is that these are more likely to catch smaller crimes and such, and will probably be used in that way.
And as far as that goes, I see no reason why they should broadcast an unencrypted signal that anybody at all can watch. They're in public locations, they're paid for with the public dollar, the public should be able to see what they see. Open it up.
You want privacy? Go home. Until they start putting cameras in your apartment, at which point I'll understand your complaining.
People would only be able to copy your songs on the local subnet though. I can see how this is some kind of problem in a dorm or something, but for most people it's not a huge issue.
Umm.. the letter *itself* said it was a generic one. I'll quote it.. Also, I believe he forgot to XXX out a few instances of the ISP name. It seems to have, in fact, been Lycos.
So which would you rather? Having to remove a tag, or having no iTMS to begin with?
Frankly, I don't give a shit whether the iTMS is there or not. If they don't want to sell music to me online, then I'll simply get it from P2P systems like I did before.
Here's the deal. The RIAA has no leverage power. Yes, they have the music, but I, the customer, have the cash. If they don't want to sell to me, fuck 'em. I'll obtain my music some other way. If they try to make a more restrictive service, fuck 'em, I'll either bypass their restrictions when they get in my way, or I'll go back to the P2P systems and they won't get a dime out of me.
You act as if they have the power in this situation. They don't. If the DRM gets too annoying, people will go back to not paying for music. It's real simple. If they want my money, they have to not piss me off too much for me to hand it over. Easy as that.
Lawsuits don't scare me. They've "sued" less than 2000 people. There's 50 million file sharers. Seems like good odds, in my book. They can't sue everybody.
If you're sending encoded music out the bluetooth connection, then you'd need a decoder on the other end. The guy was talking about sending audio to headphones, not sending encoded streams.
Hey fucktard, I was replying to a fucking post about an iPod, read the fucking thread, asshole.