Curious though, if sharing did by chance happen to be hurting album sales in the long run, (which i doubt) what do you believe should be done about that? Should governments commit to limiting people's ability to share files freely (via encumbered hardware, harsh copyright enforcement, etc)? Or is it time for the record companies to change quickly with society or die?
I have an opinion which seems to be in the minority here on Slashdot, but which enjoys some support in the music industry. Although all copyright violation is technically illegal, I prefer to make a distinction between small scale violations and systematic violations. Record companies don't particularly like home taping, but it doesn't do that much harm. Making a tape of your favorite band for a friend is a minor offense which is just as likely to generate future sales as it is to encourage future theft. A system like Napster, on the other hand, provides a systematic alternative to buying CDs. While digital theft cannot be prevented, I really do think we need to ensure that it is at least inconvenient.
Fortunately, large scale piracy is easier to regulate than small scale piracy. Napster et al have central servers that can be shut down. GnuTella apparently doesn't, so the end users will have to be targets. I also think it is appropriate to regulate what hardware manufacturers are allowed to ship. I agree with the anti-TiVo argument that allowing the consumer to record all 14 broadcasts of the Simpsons every day is an illegitimate use of broadcasting technology. The makers of TiVo should not be allowed to include that feature. My internet radio client doesn't allow me to store the stream to a disk. If someone wants to write an open source client for internet radio then I think they should be prohibited from including that feature.
I don't have a strong objection to encumbered hardware for playing CDs, but I'd prefer not to have to resort to that. I won't get all self-righteous about my constitutional right to make a backup of a CD I purchase, but I think it's a useful feature. I think a good compromise would be for the encumbered hardware to allow you to make a copy of the original disc, but not copies of copies.
If you don't like this contract, then wait things out. Capitalism is a great engine to spur innovations. Eventually, somebody, somewhere, will have a distribution model that works better than what the creative geniuses in the recording industry can come up with and the *consumers* (that's you and me) will buy into it. Eventually this model will be one that the RIAA can't squash.
That's good point. When Metallica protested against Napster they didn't say there was anything wrong with file sharing as a business model, just that they didn't get the opportunity to opt-out. If Wilco does this and it works and a whole bunch more people do it and it still works, then so be it. That's what happened with open source. Open source isn't exactly a stellar example of a business model, but it is rather popular. At least with open source, the people who develop the original software get to make the choice to release it under some particular license.
I think what the record companies need to do is no discourage music sharing by rather value add the CDs that they sell. I recently bought "Faithless - Special Edition" and the added value was a bonus CD.
Good thing no one ripped that bonus CD and posted it on the Internet. Seriously, last year people were suggesting that everyone would buy the original CDs just to get the cover art; now there are sites where people can scan in the album covers and post them. What's next? Buy the CD and get a secret decoder ring.
If they value add their CDs along the same lines as the difference between buying video or a DVD - think they they won't have a problem.
There is no doubt that people will buy DVDs just to get the bonus material. However, if a) reverse engineering the DVD encryption standard wasn't illegal, and b) bandwidth was a fair bit cheaper, don't you think that people would be "sharing" DVDs on the Internet? (or even just the bonus scenes)
An awful lot of commercial applications achieved the market share they got/have because they were released in some sort of try before you buy format, shareware, etc
It's a proven business model.
Shareware is a proven business model!?! If people were honest enough to pay for shareware then we wouldn't have crippleware, nagware, self-destructware, etc.
Plus, how much shareware do you see these days anyway? It's mostly been replaced by open source.
It still surprises me that even on a tech-savvy site like Slashdot, where most readers probably took some university-level math, most people tend to have a fairly weak understanding of logical reasoning, statistical analysis, and game theory.
1. Anecdotal evidence is worthless in statistical analysis.
Even if Wilco succeeds in this one particular case, that doesn't provide substantial evidence that releasing your album for free works in general. We don't even know for sure that it benefited Wilco. It probably did... any publicity is good publicity. But go to MP3.com and you will find a ton of bands who made $6 last month in royalties for the priviledge of allowing people to download their music for free.
2. An effect observed in a small sample size (relative to the total population) may not generalize to a large sample size.
Wilco's album appears to be selling quite well, and let's assume for the moment that that is due largely to their decision to release it for free on the Internet. Now imagine if everyone did that. Now Wilco would no longer stand out in the crowd, and they would lose the competitive advantage they gained from free promotion. Hype is a non-linear effect.
3. You must not ignore the effects of statistical lag.
Imagine a medical study where the patients who receive a new drug feel better immediately, but then die five years later. It is meaningless to compare album sales today to file "sharing" statistics today. It takes time for the effects of technology to affect the market. Take a look at the second derivative, and you may see that file "sharing" is in fact hurting album sales.
I don't know how well the inheritance issues are nailed down, but I've never been tempted to make a class inherit from a container, I just have classes have containers.
Classes derived from containers are great. I use them all the time. Sometimes, I inherit them as public and sometimes as protected. It depends on the situation.
The point you're missing is that because of fundamental quantum mechanics, a third party can't eavesdrop on the transmission without changing the properties OF the transmission. This means that their intrusion can be detected almost immediately. So even if quantum computers would allow them to crack the keys, they won't be able to get into a position to do so.
I'm not missing that point. You obviously didn't understand my previous posting. I was talking about using the use of quantum cryptography for key exchange. If you do the key exchange without authentication then you are subject to a man in the middle attack and quantum mechanics does nothing to help you (the intrusion will NOT be detected). Sure, it will still allow you to detect attempts at quantum cracking once you have a shared key, but that's not useful for wide-scale deployment.
Guys, this isn't something that will be showing up in our homes - or even large corporate offices - for years. Decades, maybe. Once this moves out of Los Alamos and into what I will call, for want of a better term, the "real world", there may be export restrictions on this, just as with PGP. That's all, I'll bet. And for now, I doubt there will be *any* legistlation.
It's not just a matter of the technical problems. A bigger question is why would you want this. We already have a key agreement protocol that works perfectly well. It's called Diffie-Hellman, and its security derives from the hardness of the discrete log problem (which is related to the factoring problem). You can make DH as strong as you want, simply by choosing larger exponentials. The danger is that someone will build a quantum computer which can crack DH in p time.
However, the whole point of key agreement is that it allows you make ah hoc communications with arbitrary parties without having to meet ahead of time to agree on a key. To do this, we need an authentication protocol such as RSA. RSA is based on similar maths as DH, so if someone can build a quantum computer that cracks DH then RSA will probably fall too. Quantum cryptography doesn't solve the authentication problem so it isn't much use for wide scale use. It doesn't make much sense for personal use either because you still have to meet with your friend in order to agree on an authentication key.
The problem with this is that you need to know in which direction it was polarized when you first receive the photon. If you guess incorrectly, then you've lost the information in that photon. Since it's possible to incorrectly guess 50% of the time, you could lose up to 50% of the transmission. It's like having to intercept a message by guessing in advance every word in the message.:)
No, that's not a problem. The reason is that you know the possible spin states ahead of time. You choose one of two possible vectors to measure along, then you tell the sender what your choice was and he can compute the same answer you got.
The real problem with quantum encryption is that it doesn't have any significant advantage over conventional encryption.
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Re:Today, the WTO pulled the trigger on another 2.
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· Score: 2
I don't think there is no incentive to develop vaccines and cures when selling treatment is so lucrative. If you can develop a cure/vaccine that will supplant the existing treatment (by a different company) then you will succeed. What typically seems to happen is that a government will fund research at a university. The researchers will develop a cure/vaccine under the presumption that when they succeed, they will be able to spin off a company to commericalize the technique.
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Re:Today, the WTO pulled the trigger on another 2.
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Slashdot Reader: This is so unfair. Starving children in Burundi are dying of AIDS because they can't afford the medicine. People in Westernized countries should pay for the cost of research because they can afford it.
Some time later....
Slashdot Reader: Guess what. I just bought this DVD for $2 from a website in Burundi, but the damn thing won't work in my player because of the regional encoding. Why should I have to pay $30 for a DVD when you can buy the exact same thing in Burundi for $2?
Hill informed police that Abraham Cherian, an Indian American
... and what exactly does that last part matter for?
My thoughts exactly. All that did was make the author seem like a whining idiot with an axe to grind. And I wonder if the subsequent line was meant to subliminally convince us that there was racism afoot:
Best Buy is now apparently red-flagging inquiring troublemakers
I understand that developing good software is astonishingly expensive, but the simple fact that BG is the richest person on earth tells me that they are charging more than just the cost of production. If they had any real competition, they would have to reduce their prices to something more akin to their costs. In a monopoly market, the cost and the price are utterly divorced. Of course, in a competitive market cost and price are occasionally divorced, but not over any lengthy period of time.
Well, Bill Gates has been the richest man for many years now. This might have something to do with him founding one of the most successful companies ever, as opposed to their current profitability (i.e. his money comes from growth, not dividends).
Microsoft may not have a lot of competition for Windows, except for Linux. I don't know why people don't consider Linux sufficient competition that Microsoft would not be a monopoly. On the office side, Microsoft did have quite a lot of competition, from Wordperfect, Lotus, etc. Apparently, this didn't drive down prices; I'm not sure why.
No one is going to make the kind of money selling OSS that you can make selling proprietary software, of course. But you can theoretically make money.
Yes, I will never dispute that you can make money, although not very much of it. A few companies will make money, but many more will lose it. Investors typically demand a fairly substantial ROI, like 20%. This is meant to take into account that for every small business that succeeds, 3 will fail. If the businesses that succeed are barely breaking even (i.e. not even keeping up with inflation), there will be no incentive to invest. Where OSS really makes business sense is on the demand side, where companies and end users don't have to pay outlandish sums for an office suite and an OS.
Those outlandish sums reflect the true cost of designing a large suite/os with lots of features, debugging, doing usability testing, etc. Software is expensive because most competant programmers demand to be paid far more than minimum wage. This is probably going to change if OSS continues to gain market share.
The software was created by a community of online hackers, not RH. If you dont' like the terms of the license under which it is released, then go buy or write your own code.
I personally don't mind not having to pay for software. What I mind is the fact that my future livelihood depends on the ability to make other people pay for software. A lot of industries are unionized, and while I haven't been a huge fan of unions in the past, I am beginning to change my mind. In a lot of industries, if you try to give away your products at below cost, someone will come and break your kneecaps. Of course, there are other industries where competition is ensured by regulations (e.g. against predatory pricing). Believe it or not, there is money to be made in OSS. If Mandrake, RH, or another distro really takes off massively, they will make their money by having control over stuff like default icons and home pages, etc., just like M$. When you upgrade to IE6 the first thing you get on your new improved browser is an ad for MSN.
Yes, because as we all know, Microsoft makes most of its money off of the one MSN ad that I apparently saw when I upgraded to IE6, and not from selling Windows and Office. I also get tempted by those default icons... Like "Refresh"! Mmmm... I feel like a 7-up right now. That would be refreshing
If I'm giving money to the government, and they turn around and spend that money to help develop software, then I sure as hell deserve a piece of it! I helped to pay for it's existence, therefore I believe that I own a piece of it.
I know what you mean. I give the government my money and they turn around and build a highway in the middle of Saskatchewan. I have no intention of ever going to Saskatchewan. Then they take more of my money to pay for medicare for poor people. I'm not poor, and on top of that I never get sick. I haven't been to the doctor in 5 years. Then they go around wasting my money trying to stimulate the economy. Listen, you money-wasting politicians, I'm a certified genius. You should see my IQ score. I'll have a job no matter how bad the economy gets.
Wait a minute, all of a sudden I sound like a redneck capitalist. I thought this GPL argument was for communists.
The GPL does not close the door on commercial versions. Selling Free Software [gnu.org]. It does stop proprietary versions however. They are different.
As usual, the open source argument degenerates into meaningless jargon. (You said "open", I meant "free". You said "proprietary", I meant "commercial".)
Next, we can argue semantics. The GPL doesn't prevent you from selling software, as long as you don't mind losing money hand over fist. (I meant "prevent" as in realistically, you mean "prevent" as in technically.)
Red Hat sells packaged versions of its software, which anyone can resell for $3, although this is considered taboo by the Linux community. Meanwhile, Mandrake can take Red Hat's distribution, rebrand it with a a few added bells and whistles, and sell their own packaged version. Red Hat gets no money from this, Mandrake has yet to break even, and all this is lauded by the Linux community
>They know that, left unregulated, music piracy is going to hurt the industry,
Almost correct. You start from the assumption that piracy is unregulated today, but that isn't true. Copyright law regulates it now. You do recall that Napster has been shut down, don't you? Whether current laws are enough or are too much is the subject for reasonable debate.
So you agree with Napster being shut down, then. While a fair number of Slashdot posters think that file "sharing" is wrong, the vast majority of moderators do not, and you will often see posts like "Mozart didn't need copyright" mod'ed up to 4, insightful.
I think that Napster, Kazaa, etc. needed to be shut down immediately. I can't understand how Napster managed to drag out their appeals for so long, and even win an injunction when they didn't have a leg to stand on. I don't know that shutting down the file sharing services would be enough to quell the flood of piracy, but it might.
On the other hand, I wouldn't be opposed to anti-theft technology that allows you to make copies, but prevents you from making copies of copies. Yes, this would require that consumer electronics enforce this regulation, but I don't anticipate that such a limitation would interfere with legitimate use.
What do you mean by truly secure, anyway? If you're always going to access the data from one computer, you might as well store it on that computer. If you are going to access the data from a multitude of computers, then you run the risk of a trojan horse on a public computer stealing your data (and this includes your encryption key if you encrypt the data on the public store).
Which is my point. The RIAA looks at a one year drop (by the way -- no more severe than 1997) and tries to turn that into rampant piracy killing the music business. There is no basis for that conclusion in their own figures, especially considering factos such as the economy and ordinary fluctuations in taste and compelling product.
I agree, although I think there is a distinction here. The RIAA is using a weak argument to reach a correct conclusion. They know that, left unregulated, music piracy is going to hurt the industry, even if they are exagerating the immediate effect. Posters on Slashdot are using a weak argument to justify a self-serving (and false) conclusion. Anyone who can say with a straight face that Napster increases CD sales may be fooling themself, but they ain't fooling me.
To put it in technical terms, using whichever derivative you prefer, the RIAA is passing gas and asking that we not comment on the smell.
If they did, in fact, observe that Napster caused the second derivative of CD sales to slump, I doubt that they could express that it terms that the averate person could understand. I personally stopped buying CDs a few years ago, all that is mostly due to the fact that the music I like is very expensive in Canada, but it's free on Internet radio.
3. Napster, the largest and most visible source for swapped files spent much of 2001 under an injunction that severely hobbled it. If anything, 2001 should have brought less so-called piracy than 2000.
Unless the pirates simply switched to Morpheus or Kazaa or Gnutella or were content to listen to their 80 gig collection of ripped music or even legal services such as Internet radio.
Sales of CDs increased every single year except for 1997, covering all of the years in which Napster was unencumbered by injunctions. Sales rebounded to record high levels in 1998, by the way, hitting new records in 1999 and 2000.
One more thing: 2001 mid-year volume, in a recession, was 397.9 units. That may be 22.7 units lower than the same period in 2000, but it is 1.1 units higher than in 1999. In fact, those recession-year statistics represent the SECOND HIGHEST volume from 1991 to the present.
As we all know, statistics can usually be manipulated to say whatever you want. When analyzing statistics, people often neglect to account for the possible effect of lag. Ridiculous claims, such as the assertion that the correlation between the advent of Napster and the increase in sales is in fact a causation, simply defy common sense. What the RIAA realizes is that CD sales are going to drop again this year, and next year. Maybe instead of looking at the first derivative of sales, you should look at the second derivative instead.
I know that there's a certain culture on Slashdot that doesn't seem to understand the concept of a grey area. I don't know why; maybe writing code in binary makes people think in terms of Boolean logic.
Personally, I want to know whether something I am about to do is legal or not. So many of our laws are written in a strictly "yes or no" fashion, that it seems reasonable to evaluate all the laws that way.
There is a very important tradeoff here. If you make the laws too precise so that judges can't use their judgement then you end up with bad laws like California's 3 strikes and you're out rule. If you make the laws too vague, then there is the danger that judges will be swayed by their own prejudices. We don't want judges basing their decisions on religion, or racism, as was done in the past.
Society works best when there is a grey area and when the judges' decisions are reasonable. You don't get thrown in jail for jaywalking. If a cop sees you he will probably ignore it. But if you nearly cause an accident, he might give you a traffic ticket.
It seems to me that lawyers and legislators (most of whom are also lawyers) like them to be ambiguous to some extent, expecting the courts to reduce the amount of ambiguity eventually. That way the lawmakers can say "I passed a law that outlawed X" (pleasing some anti-X group), knowing that it's likely that the courts will overturn it, pleasing the pro-X group
I don't think it works that way at all. Legislators pass laws that they personally support (or that they are lobbied into supporting). However, they also spend some of their time putting out fires (especially state legislators). That's how a lot of bad laws get passed. Some incident (e.g. a high-profile murder) causes a big uproar, and the legislature goes and passes some knee-jerk law that violates all sorts of constitutional rights.
Sometimes, in the real world, you have to use your judgement.
That's a good point, but the fact is that our judgement (and I think that of the average citizen) is very different from that of the legislators, the RIAA/MPAA, and especially, the courts. People have certain expectations from devices such as MP3 players, DVD players, and other gadgets, and don't see any reason that they can't play an audio CD in their computer, when it's always worked before.
The trouble is that technology and copyright have existed in a delicate balance for the last 100 years or so. Tape swapping caused some piracy, but the effects were geographically limited. Radio broadcasts may have allowed some piracy (I did some of that when I was a kid), but it's too damned inconvenient for most people. The movie industry was worried about people pirating videos, so they put that anti-sync chip into VCRs.
Yes, the industry has always survived in the past, but I think what shocks the music & movie industries about the current trends is the way that piracy can now be automated. Even stuff like TiVo and Internet radio, which fall into the grey area, will cut into their sales. I have to admit it that I buy less CDs because of Internet radio. I listen mostly to the progressive rock and hair metal channels on Spinner. Name me a city anywhere that has a radio station equivalent to the above. Since they have listeners all over the world, they can cater to individual genres. Suddenly, I don't need to buy the CDs of music that doesn't normally get played on the radio. One of the big problems I see about laws such as the son-of-SSSCA (I forgot the stupid abbreviation) is that it tries to mandate a strict, zero-tolerance technical enforcement of a specific legal policy, when the real legal policies are constantly being modified by court decisions and by variations in jurisdiction.
I think you exaggerate this interpretation of a "strict, zero-tolerance technical enforcement". The government is simply applying its usual solution, which is to regulate the industry rather than the consumers. This worked for the VCR, satellite dish, etc. They figure that it is much easier to regulate the manufacturers than to regulate every consumer. It's simply a practical solution. Sure, people can possibly work around it, but most people won't, and therefore the policy will mostly work. And if the law changes, well any time you buy hardware, you run the risk that it will become obsolete. I wouldn't buy a HDTV right now, for example.
It wouldn't be the first time I've purchased a product(esp. with regaurds to technology) and then the company goes under.
Anyways I'm willing to take that chance, it's part of being an early adopter of a technology. Which is what, for the most part, everybody using linux on the desktop are doing.
Well then you're way more dedicated that I am. Given similar prices, I have some customer loyalty. For example, I buy all my cds from my favorite local music store because I know that when I want a cd that's hard to find then they will have it. I want them to stay in business. It's a bit inconvenient to go all the way downtown to buy a cd, but there's a restaurant nearby that I like so I justify it that way.
But that's only because they have the same (or better) prices as the big chains. I wouldn't buy cds from them if I could get them all for free (legally).
Slashdot Mirror
Good post.
Thank you.
Curious though, if sharing did by chance happen to be hurting album sales in the long run, (which i doubt) what do you believe should be done about that? Should governments commit to limiting people's ability to share files freely (via encumbered hardware, harsh copyright enforcement, etc)? Or is it time for the record companies to change quickly with society or die?
I have an opinion which seems to be in the minority here on Slashdot, but which enjoys some support in the music industry. Although all copyright violation is technically illegal, I prefer to make a distinction between small scale violations and systematic violations. Record companies don't particularly like home taping, but it doesn't do that much harm. Making a tape of your favorite band for a friend is a minor offense which is just as likely to generate future sales as it is to encourage future theft. A system like Napster, on the other hand, provides a systematic alternative to buying CDs. While digital theft cannot be prevented, I really do think we need to ensure that it is at least inconvenient.
Fortunately, large scale piracy is easier to regulate than small scale piracy. Napster et al have central servers that can be shut down. GnuTella apparently doesn't, so the end users will have to be targets. I also think it is appropriate to regulate what hardware manufacturers are allowed to ship. I agree with the anti-TiVo argument that allowing the consumer to record all 14 broadcasts of the Simpsons every day is an illegitimate use of broadcasting technology. The makers of TiVo should not be allowed to include that feature. My internet radio client doesn't allow me to store the stream to a disk. If someone wants to write an open source client for internet radio then I think they should be prohibited from including that feature.
I don't have a strong objection to encumbered hardware for playing CDs, but I'd prefer not to have to resort to that. I won't get all self-righteous about my constitutional right to make a backup of a CD I purchase, but I think it's a useful feature. I think a good compromise would be for the encumbered hardware to allow you to make a copy of the original disc, but not copies of copies.
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If you don't like this contract, then wait things out. Capitalism is a great engine to spur innovations. Eventually, somebody, somewhere, will have a distribution model that works better than what the creative geniuses in the recording industry can come up with and the *consumers* (that's you and me) will buy into it. Eventually this model will be one that the RIAA can't squash.
That's good point. When Metallica protested against Napster they didn't say there was anything wrong with file sharing as a business model, just that they didn't get the opportunity to opt-out. If Wilco does this and it works and a whole bunch more people do it and it still works, then so be it. That's what happened with open source. Open source isn't exactly a stellar example of a business model, but it is rather popular. At least with open source, the people who develop the original software get to make the choice to release it under some particular license.
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I think what the record companies need to do is no discourage music sharing by rather value add the CDs that they sell. I recently bought "Faithless - Special Edition" and the added value was a bonus CD.
Good thing no one ripped that bonus CD and posted it on the Internet. Seriously, last year people were suggesting that everyone would buy the original CDs just to get the cover art; now there are sites where people can scan in the album covers and post them. What's next? Buy the CD and get a secret decoder ring.
If they value add their CDs along the same lines as the difference between buying video or a DVD - think they they won't have a problem.
There is no doubt that people will buy DVDs just to get the bonus material. However, if a) reverse engineering the DVD encryption standard wasn't illegal, and b) bandwidth was a fair bit cheaper, don't you think that people would be "sharing" DVDs on the Internet? (or even just the bonus scenes)
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An awful lot of commercial applications achieved the market share they got/have because they were released in some sort of try before you buy format, shareware, etc
It's a proven business model.
Shareware is a proven business model!?! If people were honest enough to pay for shareware then we wouldn't have crippleware, nagware, self-destructware, etc.
Plus, how much shareware do you see these days anyway? It's mostly been replaced by open source.
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It still surprises me that even on a tech-savvy site like Slashdot, where most readers probably took some university-level math, most people tend to have a fairly weak understanding of logical reasoning, statistical analysis, and game theory.
1. Anecdotal evidence is worthless in statistical analysis.
Even if Wilco succeeds in this one particular case, that doesn't provide substantial evidence that releasing your album for free works in general. We don't even know for sure that it benefited Wilco. It probably did... any publicity is good publicity. But go to MP3.com and you will find a ton of bands who made $6 last month in royalties for the priviledge of allowing people to download their music for free.
2. An effect observed in a small sample size (relative to the total population) may not generalize to a large sample size.
Wilco's album appears to be selling quite well, and let's assume for the moment that that is due largely to their decision to release it for free on the Internet. Now imagine if everyone did that. Now Wilco would no longer stand out in the crowd, and they would lose the competitive advantage they gained from free promotion. Hype is a non-linear effect.
3. You must not ignore the effects of statistical lag.
Imagine a medical study where the patients who receive a new drug feel better immediately, but then die five years later. It is meaningless to compare album sales today to file "sharing" statistics today. It takes time for the effects of technology to affect the market. Take a look at the second derivative, and you may see that file "sharing" is in fact hurting album sales.
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I don't know how well the inheritance issues are nailed down, but I've never been tempted to make a class inherit from a container, I just have classes have containers.
Classes derived from containers are great. I use them all the time. Sometimes, I inherit them as public and sometimes as protected. It depends on the situation.
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The point you're missing is that because of fundamental quantum mechanics, a third party can't eavesdrop on the transmission without changing the properties OF the transmission. This means that their intrusion can be detected almost immediately. So even if quantum computers would allow them to crack the keys, they won't be able to get into a position to do so.
I'm not missing that point. You obviously didn't understand my previous posting. I was talking about using the use of quantum cryptography for key exchange. If you do the key exchange without authentication then you are subject to a man in the middle attack and quantum mechanics does nothing to help you (the intrusion will NOT be detected). Sure, it will still allow you to detect attempts at quantum cracking once you have a shared key, but that's not useful for wide-scale deployment.
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Oh. Okay, then.
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Guys, this isn't something that will be showing up in our homes - or even large corporate offices - for years. Decades, maybe. Once this moves out of Los Alamos and into what I will call, for want of a better term, the "real world", there may be export restrictions on this, just as with PGP. That's all, I'll bet. And for now, I doubt there will be *any* legistlation.
It's not just a matter of the technical problems. A bigger question is why would you want this. We already have a key agreement protocol that works perfectly well. It's called Diffie-Hellman, and its security derives from the hardness of the discrete log problem (which is related to the factoring problem). You can make DH as strong as you want, simply by choosing larger exponentials. The danger is that someone will build a quantum computer which can crack DH in p time.
However, the whole point of key agreement is that it allows you make ah hoc communications with arbitrary parties without having to meet ahead of time to agree on a key. To do this, we need an authentication protocol such as RSA. RSA is based on similar maths as DH, so if someone can build a quantum computer that cracks DH then RSA will probably fall too. Quantum cryptography doesn't solve the authentication problem so it isn't much use for wide scale use. It doesn't make much sense for personal use either because you still have to meet with your friend in order to agree on an authentication key.
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The problem with this is that you need to know in which direction it was polarized when you first receive the photon. If you guess incorrectly, then you've lost the information in that photon. Since it's possible to incorrectly guess 50% of the time, you could lose up to 50% of the transmission. It's like having to intercept a message by guessing in advance every word in the message.
No, that's not a problem. The reason is that you know the possible spin states ahead of time. You choose one of two possible vectors to measure along, then you tell the sender what your choice was and he can compute the same answer you got.
The real problem with quantum encryption is that it doesn't have any significant advantage over conventional encryption.
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I don't think there is no incentive to develop vaccines and cures when selling treatment is so lucrative. If you can develop a cure/vaccine that will supplant the existing treatment (by a different company) then you will succeed. What typically seems to happen is that a government will fund research at a university. The researchers will develop a cure/vaccine under the presumption that when they succeed, they will be able to spin off a company to commericalize the technique.
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Slashdot Reader: This is so unfair. Starving children in Burundi are dying of AIDS because they can't afford the medicine. People in Westernized countries should pay for the cost of research because they can afford it.
Some time later....
Slashdot Reader: Guess what. I just bought this DVD for $2 from a website in Burundi, but the damn thing won't work in my player because of the regional encoding. Why should I have to pay $30 for a DVD when you can buy the exact same thing in Burundi for $2?
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... and what exactly does that last part matter for?
My thoughts exactly. All that did was make the author seem like a whining idiot with an axe to grind. And I wonder if the subsequent line was meant to subliminally convince us that there was racism afoot:
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I thought a toilet made entirely out of rice would have been funnier.
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I understand that developing good software is astonishingly expensive, but the simple fact that BG is the richest person on earth tells me that they are charging more than just the cost of production. If they had any real competition, they would have to reduce their prices to something more akin to their costs. In a monopoly market, the cost and the price are utterly divorced. Of course, in a competitive market cost and price are occasionally divorced, but not over any lengthy period of time.
Well, Bill Gates has been the richest man for many years now. This might have something to do with him founding one of the most successful companies ever, as opposed to their current profitability (i.e. his money comes from growth, not dividends).
Microsoft may not have a lot of competition for Windows, except for Linux. I don't know why people don't consider Linux sufficient competition that Microsoft would not be a monopoly. On the office side, Microsoft did have quite a lot of competition, from Wordperfect, Lotus, etc. Apparently, this didn't drive down prices; I'm not sure why.
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No one is going to make the kind of money selling OSS that you can make selling proprietary software, of course. But you can theoretically make money.
Yes, I will never dispute that you can make money, although not very much of it. A few companies will make money, but many more will lose it. Investors typically demand a fairly substantial ROI, like 20%. This is meant to take into account that for every small business that succeeds, 3 will fail. If the businesses that succeed are barely breaking even (i.e. not even keeping up with inflation), there will be no incentive to invest.
Where OSS really makes business sense is on the demand side, where companies and end users don't have to pay outlandish sums for an office suite and an OS.
Those outlandish sums reflect the true cost of designing a large suite/os with lots of features, debugging, doing usability testing, etc. Software is expensive because most competant programmers demand to be paid far more than minimum wage. This is probably going to change if OSS continues to gain market share.
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The software was created by a community of online hackers, not RH. If you dont' like the terms of the license under which it is released, then go buy or write your own code.
I personally don't mind not having to pay for software. What I mind is the fact that my future livelihood depends on the ability to make other people pay for software. A lot of industries are unionized, and while I haven't been a huge fan of unions in the past, I am beginning to change my mind. In a lot of industries, if you try to give away your products at below cost, someone will come and break your kneecaps. Of course, there are other industries where competition is ensured by regulations (e.g. against predatory pricing).
Believe it or not, there is money to be made in OSS. If Mandrake, RH, or another distro really takes off massively, they will make their money by having control over stuff like default icons and home pages, etc., just like M$. When you upgrade to IE6 the first thing you get on your new improved browser is an ad for MSN.
Yes, because as we all know, Microsoft makes most of its money off of the one MSN ad that I apparently saw when I upgraded to IE6, and not from selling Windows and Office. I also get tempted by those default icons... Like "Refresh"! Mmmm... I feel like a 7-up right now. That would be refreshing
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If I'm giving money to the government, and they turn around and spend that money to help develop software, then I sure as hell deserve a piece of it! I helped to pay for it's existence, therefore I believe that I own a piece of it.
I know what you mean. I give the government my money and they turn around and build a highway in the middle of Saskatchewan. I have no intention of ever going to Saskatchewan. Then they take more of my money to pay for medicare for poor people. I'm not poor, and on top of that I never get sick. I haven't been to the doctor in 5 years. Then they go around wasting my money trying to stimulate the economy. Listen, you money-wasting politicians, I'm a certified genius. You should see my IQ score. I'll have a job no matter how bad the economy gets.
Wait a minute, all of a sudden I sound like a redneck capitalist. I thought this GPL argument was for communists.
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The GPL does not close the door on commercial versions. Selling Free Software [gnu.org]. It does stop proprietary versions however. They are different.
As usual, the open source argument degenerates into meaningless jargon. (You said "open", I meant "free". You said "proprietary", I meant "commercial".)
Next, we can argue semantics. The GPL doesn't prevent you from selling software, as long as you don't mind losing money hand over fist. (I meant "prevent" as in realistically, you mean "prevent" as in technically.)
Red Hat sells packaged versions of its software, which anyone can resell for $3, although this is considered taboo by the Linux community. Meanwhile, Mandrake can take Red Hat's distribution, rebrand it with a a few added bells and whistles, and sell their own packaged version. Red Hat gets no money from this, Mandrake has yet to break even, and all this is lauded by the Linux community
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>They know that, left unregulated, music piracy is going to hurt the industry,
Almost correct. You start from the assumption that piracy is unregulated today, but that isn't true. Copyright law regulates it now. You do recall that Napster has been shut down, don't you? Whether current laws are enough or are too much is the subject for reasonable debate.
So you agree with Napster being shut down, then. While a fair number of Slashdot posters think that file "sharing" is wrong, the vast majority of moderators do not, and you will often see posts like "Mozart didn't need copyright" mod'ed up to 4, insightful.
I think that Napster, Kazaa, etc. needed to be shut down immediately. I can't understand how Napster managed to drag out their appeals for so long, and even win an injunction when they didn't have a leg to stand on. I don't know that shutting down the file sharing services would be enough to quell the flood of piracy, but it might.
On the other hand, I wouldn't be opposed to anti-theft technology that allows you to make copies, but prevents you from making copies of copies. Yes, this would require that consumer electronics enforce this regulation, but I don't anticipate that such a limitation would interfere with legitimate use.
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What do you mean by truly secure, anyway? If you're always going to access the data from one computer, you might as well store it on that computer. If you are going to access the data from a multitude of computers, then you run the risk of a trojan horse on a public computer stealing your data (and this includes your encryption key if you encrypt the data on the public store).
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Which is my point. The RIAA looks at a one year drop (by the way -- no more severe than 1997) and tries to turn that into rampant piracy killing the music business. There is no basis for that conclusion in their own figures, especially considering factos such as the economy and ordinary fluctuations in taste and compelling product.
I agree, although I think there is a distinction here. The RIAA is using a weak argument to reach a correct conclusion. They know that, left unregulated, music piracy is going to hurt the industry, even if they are exagerating the immediate effect. Posters on Slashdot are using a weak argument to justify a self-serving (and false) conclusion. Anyone who can say with a straight face that Napster increases CD sales may be fooling themself, but they ain't fooling me.
To put it in technical terms, using whichever derivative you prefer, the RIAA is passing gas and asking that we not comment on the smell.
If they did, in fact, observe that Napster caused the second derivative of CD sales to slump, I doubt that they could express that it terms that the averate person could understand. I personally stopped buying CDs a few years ago, all that is mostly due to the fact that the music I like is very expensive in Canada, but it's free on Internet radio.
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3. Napster, the largest and most visible source for swapped files spent much of 2001 under an injunction that severely hobbled it. If anything, 2001 should have brought less so-called piracy than 2000.
Unless the pirates simply switched to Morpheus or Kazaa or Gnutella or were content to listen to their 80 gig collection of ripped music or even legal services such as Internet radio.
Sales of CDs increased every single year except for 1997, covering all of the years in which Napster was unencumbered by injunctions. Sales rebounded to record high levels in 1998, by the way, hitting new records in 1999 and 2000.
One more thing: 2001 mid-year volume, in a recession, was 397.9 units. That may be 22.7 units lower than the same period in 2000, but it is 1.1 units higher than in 1999. In fact, those recession-year statistics represent the SECOND HIGHEST volume from 1991 to the present.
As we all know, statistics can usually be manipulated to say whatever you want. When analyzing statistics, people often neglect to account for the possible effect of lag. Ridiculous claims, such as the assertion that the correlation between the advent of Napster and the increase in sales is in fact a causation, simply defy common sense. What the RIAA realizes is that CD sales are going to drop again this year, and next year. Maybe instead of looking at the first derivative of sales, you should look at the second derivative instead.
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Personally, I want to know whether something I am about to do is legal or not. So many of our laws are written in a strictly "yes or no" fashion, that it seems reasonable to evaluate all the laws that way.
There is a very important tradeoff here. If you make the laws too precise so that judges can't use their judgement then you end up with bad laws like California's 3 strikes and you're out rule. If you make the laws too vague, then there is the danger that judges will be swayed by their own prejudices. We don't want judges basing their decisions on religion, or racism, as was done in the past.
Society works best when there is a grey area and when the judges' decisions are reasonable. You don't get thrown in jail for jaywalking. If a cop sees you he will probably ignore it. But if you nearly cause an accident, he might give you a traffic ticket.
It seems to me that lawyers and legislators (most of whom are also lawyers) like them to be ambiguous to some extent, expecting the courts to reduce the amount of ambiguity eventually. That way the lawmakers can say "I passed a law that outlawed X" (pleasing some anti-X group), knowing that it's likely that the courts will overturn it, pleasing the pro-X group
I don't think it works that way at all. Legislators pass laws that they personally support (or that they are lobbied into supporting). However, they also spend some of their time putting out fires (especially state legislators). That's how a lot of bad laws get passed. Some incident (e.g. a high-profile murder) causes a big uproar, and the legislature goes and passes some knee-jerk law that violates all sorts of constitutional rights.
That's a good point, but the fact is that our judgement (and I think that of the average citizen) is very different from that of the legislators, the RIAA/MPAA, and especially, the courts. People have certain expectations from devices such as MP3 players, DVD players, and other gadgets, and don't see any reason that they can't play an audio CD in their computer, when it's always worked before.
The trouble is that technology and copyright have existed in a delicate balance for the last 100 years or so. Tape swapping caused some piracy, but the effects were geographically limited. Radio broadcasts may have allowed some piracy (I did some of that when I was a kid), but it's too damned inconvenient for most people. The movie industry was worried about people pirating videos, so they put that anti-sync chip into VCRs.
Yes, the industry has always survived in the past, but I think what shocks the music & movie industries about the current trends is the way that piracy can now be automated. Even stuff like TiVo and Internet radio, which fall into the grey area, will cut into their sales. I have to admit it that I buy less CDs because of Internet radio. I listen mostly to the progressive rock and hair metal channels on Spinner. Name me a city anywhere that has a radio station equivalent to the above. Since they have listeners all over the world, they can cater to individual genres. Suddenly, I don't need to buy the CDs of music that doesn't normally get played on the radio.
One of the big problems I see about laws such as the son-of-SSSCA (I forgot the stupid abbreviation) is that it tries to mandate a strict, zero-tolerance technical enforcement of a specific legal policy, when the real legal policies are constantly being modified by court decisions and by variations in jurisdiction.
I think you exaggerate this interpretation of a "strict, zero-tolerance technical enforcement". The government is simply applying its usual solution, which is to regulate the industry rather than the consumers. This worked for the VCR, satellite dish, etc. They figure that it is much easier to regulate the manufacturers than to regulate every consumer. It's simply a practical solution. Sure, people can possibly work around it, but most people won't, and therefore the policy will mostly work. And if the law changes, well any time you buy hardware, you run the risk that it will become obsolete. I wouldn't buy a HDTV right now, for example.
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It wouldn't be the first time I've purchased a product(esp. with regaurds to technology) and then the company goes under.
Anyways I'm willing to take that chance, it's part of being an early adopter of a technology. Which is what, for the most part, everybody using linux on the desktop are doing.
Well then you're way more dedicated that I am. Given similar prices, I have some customer loyalty. For example, I buy all my cds from my favorite local music store because I know that when I want a cd that's hard to find then they will have it. I want them to stay in business. It's a bit inconvenient to go all the way downtown to buy a cd, but there's a restaurant nearby that I like so I justify it that way.
But that's only because they have the same (or better) prices as the big chains. I wouldn't buy cds from them if I could get them all for free (legally).
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