Huh? If Steven Levy had published an eponymous book it would have been entitled "Steven Levy".
This bugged me as well. I don't consider myself a grammar-Nazi, but if you are going to use deliberately abstruse language (e.g. "leitmotifs" instead of simply "motifs") you probably ought to know what the word means.
I've never heard of this drag-and-drop onto an icon feature. I only have NT4 so perhaps it was added in W2K. In the past I have used shortcuts to the other desktop, but the SMB call takes about 30 seconds to complete, which is really annoying.
The idea that it would be really hard to copy info between 2 computers unless you can drag from one desktop to another!
Believe it or not, this is a feature I would use. Right now, copying a file between two computers involves: 1. launch an ftp server, 2. copy the file to ftproot, 3. run my script which automatically logs into said server, 4 type "get ". It's not super-inconvenient, but definitely not as easy as a laser pointer drag and drop.
Not only is 25 cents per track 1/5th the price you might pay for a CD, but it also doesn't take into account the fact that some tracks are worth more than others./. Readers are forever complaining that most CDs only contain 2 good songs (thankfully not the ones I buy). Part of the motivation for wanting per track downloading is so they can save money by only buying the 2 songs.
Supposedly, this offers encryption with less computational demand. And, supposedly, it's not going to be in use for 5 to 10 years.
I know the article was a bit low on facts (and more of a big ad for Sun), but you really need to do some Googling before you post. In fact, ECC is used for key agreement and sometimes authentication but almost never encryption. If that's the case, my quesion is this: Why bother? Moore's law says that in the 10 years that it will take to get this implemented, CPU's will be *64 times faster* than they are today.
It makes a big difference. Public key operations are slow by nature. When you decrease the keylength, not only do you have fewer bigint multiplies to perform, but the real key is that you are multiplying smaller numbers. Keep in mind that in 10 years you will also need to use longer keylengths to be secure. Just think: "Wow! With this new encryption technology, encrypted 100 megabit networking only takes 0.05% of my processer instead of 0.1%!"
Maybe in 10 years your networking apps will require 64 times as much bandwidth. Anyway, it's a moot point since no one uses ECC for encryption. ECC is used mostly for key agreement, where practical key lengths are limited by how long you want to make the user wait. A Diffie-Hellman operation with a conservative key length could take as much as 5 seconds of CPU time on a Pentium 2. The equivalent ECCDH negotiation might take only 1 second. Surely that's a significant enough difference.
Is this true? I thought it was commonly known that if you create a hotmail account with a suitably obscure name xyxxaqqf2, and use it for nothing, and don't give out the address, you will receive spam (even after turning on hotmail's spam filters).
When you sign up, the service will ask if you would like to be listed in the directory. Say no.
You are just quoting sections of the article... But nowhere did she say she encourages free copying of music.
Well, I didn't say she did exactly. I used the word "let", which doesn't connote approval, only resignation. Let me amend my flowchart to something a bit clearer:
1. Ignore the problem of people copy your music for free. 2. Pad your CDs with premium content that they can also copy for free. 3. ??? 4. Profit
The point is, she actually suggested step 2 as a viable solution to the problem of copying. Business models such as these wouldn't even pass the laugh test on any forum besides/. Here, it might possibly be the majority opinion.
I remember being headhunted by an SV startup with an idea for a new online service. I asked how they planned to make money. "Oh we'll worry about that later. I guess we'll sell advertising. We'll pay people to read ads if necessary." Right... I can see you've put a lot of thought into this. I was not surprised to hear that they ran out of money a few months later.
In previous/. threads, I have noticed the temptation to assume that a solution exists, so the best alternative must be correct. You can see this attitude in rash statements such as "There will always be jobs for X" or "Businesses will always pay for software in order to get the support contracts" or "We don't need to worry about global warming because mankind will find a technological solution before it ever gets of control." These are all completely unjustified assumptions but you hear them all the time on/.
Also, CDs currently can be copied for free and record companies DO still profit. And have for years. And are likely to still make money for years. There is a large, very large group of people who would rather pick up the cd at wal-mart than try to download all the tracks from a p2p service.
Allow me to quote from the question she was responding to:
However, let's take a look into the future. Let's say that technology has evolved to the point where one can transfer complete, same as CD-quality albums in less than a second, and imprint them onto CD (or whatever the current technology is) in even less time. One click allows me to fully reproduce Janis Ian's latest release - liner notes & all.
Where did she encourage "letting people copy it for free"? She said she didn't tink file sharing was going to go away, that's not the same thing at all.
Again, allow me to quote from the question she was asked:
At that point, should artists be worried? Or, to put it more generally, should artists always permit the reproducing of their works?
So in both cases you may protest that "she never said X", but I would say that she was responding to the question "what about X?" so either she is agreeing with X or she is evading the question.
I think, as I said in my follow-up article, that the music industry is going to have to provide more and better content in its CDs. Maybe CDs all become DVDs, and you get not just the music, but interviews, concert footage, games, whatever. I don't have the answer.
Here's another variation on the old theme:
1. Let people copy your music for free. 2. Pad your CDs with premium content that they can also copy for free. 3. ??? 4. Profit
If at first you don't succeed, try try try again. When scientists/alchemists figure out how to get blood from a stone I'm sure it will be frontpage news.
How does crap like this get modified as insightful? The argument may incomplete, but Ishikawa is at least nice enough to credit his audience with the ability to make simple assumptions, such as the vast majority of people don't have kiddie porn on their harddrive.
If you want to use this logical argument, at least save it for a topic where it might be relevant. E.g. "police claim 60% of traffic accidents are caused by speeders". Where I live, at least 60% of cars on the road appear to be speeding. look in their homes, you inevitably find air. So air is a precursor to this bad behavior... blah blah blah... Correlation is not causation.
A dumb statement, since you didn't even show a correlation. Try looking it up in a dictionary:
Correlate: to establish a mutual or reciprocal relation between
Kiddie porn may imply air, but air does not imply kiddie porn. But let us not go down the slippery slope of incorrectly reasoning to justify our actions, 'mkay?
Those who resort to slippery slope arguments really shouldn't be lecturing others on the use of logic...
The disadvantage of this approach is that for these devices to be useful at say a supermarket, the master key still has to be stored on a server somewhere. If someone hacks the server, they can then impersonate you.
The advantage of this approach over other physical authentication techniques such as biometrics is that you don't have to trust the scanners. With fingerprint readers, once they scan you they can then store your fingerprint and impersonate you. That doesn't seem possible with this new approach.
Of course for pure theoretical security, it still doesn't match a smartcard with an RSA key encrypted with a strong 128 bit password that the user has to type in every time he wants to use the card. Unless you want to embed the smartcard inside a refractive epoxy for the best of both worlds.
To all you idiot language designers, let me point out that if you had not stolen common identifiers and turned them into reserved keywords, then variable names like "new" would not cause problems.
Not using common words as function/variable names is just common sense. God forbid you name a function open() and then you later need to link in the socket library.
Nah, this'd be great. Setup a honeypot server that offers free wireless web access. Then when someone tries to hack you and you go after them, you're guaranteed to find them within a 3 block radius.
Even Hungarian Notation is a big improvement over having no naming conventions at all.
To all the die-hard C programmers who refuse to make the Linux kernel C++ compatible because they are using variable names such as "new", let me point out that this wouldn't be a problem if you had called the variable nNew, gNew, new_p, or any kind of mangled name at all.
Sometimes the key is just to have a structure, and it doesn't matter what the structure is.
I thought intel et al were supposed to be using software as a loss leader to sell their custom hardware. Not much use if all the software runs on old hardware!! (So how come they haven't started pushing Linux XP yet?)
I doubt that. 20 years ago, your neighbour, your baker and your butcher knew more about you than any mass e-mail marketing company does nowadays.
Uhh... sorry to be literal, but 20 years ago I didn't know my butcher personally and I still don't. I buy mostly buy meat at the supermarket. I think it was more like 60 years ago that everyone bought meat from the local butcher.
On the other hand, my credit card issuer knows far more about me than any e-mail marketer. They know that I play golf once a week, how much I spend in the grocery store, when and where I go on vacation, etc. All the average e-mail marketer (thinks they) know about me is that I like rape pr0n.
In the future when Europe is on the verge of falling to a European dictator, we will leave Europe alone.
No you won't. You'll wait to see if England, Canada, and Australia can defeat the enemy on their own, and if they can't then you'll swoop in to save the day.
One place it becomes an issue is when you have TV screens in the foreground in a movie set. For example, the monitors inside the Nebuchadnezzar were playing VHS when they were in the background but Beta when they were in the foreground. You can read about it in an interview on the Matrix website.
The whole open source business model is predicated on the assumption that big companies will continue to pay large sums of money for customization of off-the-shelf components. Of course you can do it fast, but if you still want to have a job in a couple of years we need to preserve the illusion.
I think the/. editors must have been sleeping at the switch when they let this one though. Whatever happened to editorial bias?
I liked this quote: The net effect of tapes was positive. But it doesn't mean that it wouldn't have been more positive if people weren't making more copies. [What is clear is that] there's no evidence in the data that the tapes caused a decline.
That's one think I noticed from previous stories on this issue. Readers are always quick to point out that sales increased during the Napster years, but they overlook the fact that the sales were also decelerating at that point. You can't just look at a simplistic side-by-side comparison and expect to jump to a fair conclusion.
Fuck am I pissed off. I wrote a long reply and/. expired my session so I lost it. Fortunately it's still fresh in my mind:
Rationalizing is not so much picking a belief and supporting it later. Rationalization tends to have an underlying current of self-deception. Of course it's subjective, but you can tell when someone is rationalizing their beliefs. Look for strained metaphors or arbitrary distinctions. Look at how Christian Scientists explain science.
Rationalized opinions don't have to be self-consistent. Look at a site like/. where the popular opinion is anti-copyright is and pro-GPL. Both of these issues have to do with authors maintaining control of their works. These would appear to be mutually contradictory opinions, and yet any/. reader worth his salt can come up with an excuse why the rules should be different for the GPL (ask 5 readers, get 5 different reasons).
The law (which was written after 1776) supports the idea that copyright infringement is theft. I fully believe that leeching can be theft. If you don't think it's theft unless you deprive someone of property, what about the grayscale of a) copying a CD, b) sneaking into a concert without paying, and c) commissioning services and then refusing to pay? In each case, you are stealing someone's time.
I think copyrights need to have a lifetime on the order of the lifetime of the author. I see no reason to create a dynasty. I think patents are necessary too, and I agree with you that the lifetime of the patent should vary for different industries. I think the case for copyright is much stronger than the case for patents. Patents stimulate research. When you invent something, you accelerate the progress of human reason, but there is a good chance that someone else would have eventually discovered the same thing anyway. When you create a work of art, you have done something unique. If you had never created it, it would never have existed. Therefore, you deserve much more control over your work.
In a capitalist society, not all laws can benefit everyone. Some laws have to benefit the individual. It would benefit 99.999% of society to pass a law that appropriated all your property and shared it among everyone else, but it would be eminently unfair to you.
I find it unlikely that people are going to end up in Mexican prisons or beaten to death by the side of the road for violating copyright. Financially ruined, maybe. BTW, the problem with Dmitry is that he was not as much of a saint as the EFF made him out to be.
I believe that businesses have the right to choose what price they sell their product at. When you pay $15 for a movie you get more value than if you rent it for $5. If you pay $30 a month flat rate for cable you don't get to choose exactly what and when you watch. You have to pay for choice and convenience. Movies are hardly the only industry where this applies.
The most likely effect of Tivos is that the quality of programming will go down. This is due to the twin effects of a) an increased number of channels and b) less ad revenue to go around. The public won't tolerate huge rate increases (and they prefer flat rate to pay-per-use), so the budget for each channel is going to go down.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? If Steven Levy had published an eponymous book it would have been entitled "Steven Levy".
This bugged me as well. I don't consider myself a grammar-Nazi, but if you are going to use deliberately abstruse language (e.g. "leitmotifs" instead of simply "motifs") you probably ought to know what the word means.
-a
I've never heard of this drag-and-drop onto an icon feature. I only have NT4 so perhaps it was added in W2K. In the past I have used shortcuts to the other desktop, but the SMB call takes about 30 seconds to complete, which is really annoying.
-a
The idea that it would be really hard to copy info between 2 computers unless you can drag from one desktop to another!
Believe it or not, this is a feature I would use. Right now, copying a file between two computers involves: 1. launch an ftp server, 2. copy the file to ftproot, 3. run my script which automatically logs into said server, 4 type "get ". It's not super-inconvenient, but definitely not as easy as a laser pointer drag and drop.
-a
Not only is 25 cents per track 1/5th the price you might pay for a CD, but it also doesn't take into account the fact that some tracks are worth more than others. /. Readers are forever complaining that most CDs only contain 2 good songs (thankfully not the ones I buy). Part of the motivation for wanting per track downloading is so they can save money by only buying the 2 songs.
-a
Don't agree? Fancy a giggle? Then read this question's answer [gnu.org]. I found it most entertaining, whilst ensuring they get zero credibility.
Basically what this all boils down to is:
If you don't say Gnu/Linux then the capitalists have won.
-a
Supposedly, this offers encryption with less computational demand. And, supposedly, it's not going to be in use for 5 to 10 years.
I know the article was a bit low on facts (and more of a big ad for Sun), but you really need to do some Googling before you post. In fact, ECC is used for key agreement and sometimes authentication but almost never encryption.
If that's the case, my quesion is this: Why bother? Moore's law says that in the 10 years that it will take to get this implemented, CPU's will be *64 times faster* than they are today.
It makes a big difference. Public key operations are slow by nature. When you decrease the keylength, not only do you have fewer bigint multiplies to perform, but the real key is that you are multiplying smaller numbers. Keep in mind that in 10 years you will also need to use longer keylengths to be secure.
Just think: "Wow! With this new encryption technology, encrypted 100 megabit networking only takes 0.05% of my processer instead of 0.1%!"
Maybe in 10 years your networking apps will require 64 times as much bandwidth. Anyway, it's a moot point since no one uses ECC for encryption. ECC is used mostly for key agreement, where practical key lengths are limited by how long you want to make the user wait. A Diffie-Hellman operation with a conservative key length could take as much as 5 seconds of CPU time on a Pentium 2. The equivalent ECCDH negotiation might take only 1 second. Surely that's a significant enough difference.
-a
On another note, I really need to take some vacation time and get through that backlog of e-mail...
Ohmygod, I hope you're joking. For most people, cleaning out their inbox is that unpleasant task they do when they get back from vacation. I pity you.
-a
Is this true? I thought it was commonly known that if you create a hotmail account with a suitably obscure name xyxxaqqf2, and use it for nothing, and don't give out the address, you will receive spam (even after turning on hotmail's spam filters).
When you sign up, the service will ask if you would like to be listed in the directory. Say no.
-a
You are just quoting sections of the article... But nowhere did she say she encourages free copying of music.
Well, I didn't say she did exactly. I used the word "let", which doesn't connote approval, only resignation. Let me amend my flowchart to something a bit clearer:
1. Ignore the problem of people copy your music for free.
2. Pad your CDs with premium content that they can also copy for free.
3. ???
4. Profit
The point is, she actually suggested step 2 as a viable solution to the problem of copying. Business models such as these wouldn't even pass the laugh test on any forum besides
I remember being headhunted by an SV startup with an idea for a new online service. I asked how they planned to make money. "Oh we'll worry about that later. I guess we'll sell advertising. We'll pay people to read ads if necessary." Right... I can see you've put a lot of thought into this. I was not surprised to hear that they ran out of money a few months later.
In previous
-a
Also, CDs currently can be copied for free and record companies DO still profit. And have for years. And are likely to still make money for years. There is a large, very large group of people who would rather pick up the cd at wal-mart than try to download all the tracks from a p2p service.
Allow me to quote from the question she was responding to:
Where did she encourage "letting people copy it for free"? She said she didn't tink file sharing was going to go away, that's not the same thing at all.
Again, allow me to quote from the question she was asked:
So in both cases you may protest that "she never said X", but I would say that she was responding to the question "what about X?" so either she is agreeing with X or she is evading the question.
-a
I think, as I said in my follow-up article, that the music industry is going to have to provide more and better content in its CDs. Maybe CDs all become DVDs, and you get not just the music, but interviews, concert footage, games, whatever. I don't have the answer.
Here's another variation on the old theme:
1. Let people copy your music for free.
2. Pad your CDs with premium content that they can also copy for free.
3. ???
4. Profit
If at first you don't succeed, try try try again. When scientists/alchemists figure out how to get blood from a stone I'm sure it will be frontpage news.
-a
If you want to use this logical argument, at least save it for a topic where it might be relevant. E.g. "police claim 60% of traffic accidents are caused by speeders". Where I live, at least 60% of cars on the road appear to be speeding.
look in their homes, you inevitably find air. So air is a precursor to this bad behavior... blah blah blah... Correlation is not causation.
A dumb statement, since you didn't even show a correlation. Try looking it up in a dictionary:
Kiddie porn may imply air, but air does not imply kiddie porn.
But let us not go down the slippery slope of incorrectly reasoning to justify our actions, 'mkay?
Those who resort to slippery slope arguments really shouldn't be lecturing others on the use of logic...
-a
The disadvantage of this approach is that for these devices to be useful at say a supermarket, the master key still has to be stored on a server somewhere. If someone hacks the server, they can then impersonate you.
The advantage of this approach over other physical authentication techniques such as biometrics is that you don't have to trust the scanners. With fingerprint readers, once they scan you they can then store your fingerprint and impersonate you. That doesn't seem possible with this new approach.
Of course for pure theoretical security, it still doesn't match a smartcard with an RSA key encrypted with a strong 128 bit password that the user has to type in every time he wants to use the card. Unless you want to embed the smartcard inside a refractive epoxy for the best of both worlds.
-a
To all you idiot language designers, let me point out that if you had not stolen common identifiers and turned them into reserved keywords, then variable names like "new" would not cause problems.
Not using common words as function/variable names is just common sense. God forbid you name a function open() and then you later need to link in the socket library.
-a
No. honeypot != free wireless access point
Nah, this'd be great. Setup a honeypot server that offers free wireless web access. Then when someone tries to hack you and you go after them, you're guaranteed to find them within a 3 block radius.
-a
Even Hungarian Notation is a big improvement over having no naming conventions at all.
To all the die-hard C programmers who refuse to make the Linux kernel C++ compatible because they are using variable names such as "new", let me point out that this wouldn't be a problem if you had called the variable nNew, gNew, new_p, or any kind of mangled name at all.
Sometimes the key is just to have a structure, and it doesn't matter what the structure is.
-a
I thought intel et al were supposed to be using software as a loss leader to sell their custom hardware. Not much use if all the software runs on old hardware!! (So how come they haven't started pushing Linux XP yet?)
-a
I doubt that. 20 years ago, your neighbour, your baker and your butcher knew more about you than any mass e-mail marketing company does nowadays.
Uhh... sorry to be literal, but 20 years ago I didn't know my butcher personally and I still don't. I buy mostly buy meat at the supermarket. I think it was more like 60 years ago that everyone bought meat from the local butcher.
On the other hand, my credit card issuer knows far more about me than any e-mail marketer. They know that I play golf once a week, how much I spend in the grocery store, when and where I go on vacation, etc. All the average e-mail marketer (thinks they) know about me is that I like rape pr0n.
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So what does this have to do with Christian Science exactly?
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In the future when Europe is on the verge of falling to a European dictator, we will leave Europe alone.
No you won't. You'll wait to see if England, Canada, and Australia can defeat the enemy on their own, and if they can't then you'll swoop in to save the day.
-a
Are you actually using the "we saved your ass in WWII" argument? Man! I thought only homer Simpson said things like that!
Hey, Tony Blair said it on (inter)national TV.
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One place it becomes an issue is when you have TV screens in the foreground in a movie set. For example, the monitors inside the Nebuchadnezzar were playing VHS when they were in the background but Beta when they were in the foreground. You can read about it in an interview on the Matrix website.
-a
The whole open source business model is predicated on the assumption that big companies will continue to pay large sums of money for customization of off-the-shelf components. Of course you can do it fast, but if you still want to have a job in a couple of years we need to preserve the illusion.
-a
I think the /. editors must have been sleeping at the switch when they let this one though. Whatever happened to editorial bias?
I liked this quote:
The net effect of tapes was positive. But it doesn't mean that it wouldn't have been more positive if people weren't making more copies. [What is clear is that] there's no evidence in the data that the tapes caused a decline.
That's one think I noticed from previous stories on this issue. Readers are always quick to point out that sales increased during the Napster years, but they overlook the fact that the sales were also decelerating at that point. You can't just look at a simplistic side-by-side comparison and expect to jump to a fair conclusion.
-a
Fuck am I pissed off. I wrote a long reply and /. expired my session so I lost it. Fortunately it's still fresh in my mind:
/. where the popular opinion is anti-copyright is and pro-GPL. Both of these issues have to do with authors maintaining control of their works. These would appear to be mutually contradictory opinions, and yet any /. reader worth his salt can come up with an excuse why the rules should be different for the GPL (ask 5 readers, get 5 different reasons).
Rationalizing is not so much picking a belief and supporting it later. Rationalization tends to have an underlying current of self-deception. Of course it's subjective, but you can tell when someone is rationalizing their beliefs. Look for strained metaphors or arbitrary distinctions. Look at how Christian Scientists explain science.
Rationalized opinions don't have to be self-consistent. Look at a site like
The law (which was written after 1776) supports the idea that copyright infringement is theft. I fully believe that leeching can be theft. If you don't think it's theft unless you deprive someone of property, what about the grayscale of a) copying a CD, b) sneaking into a concert without paying, and c) commissioning services and then refusing to pay? In each case, you are stealing someone's time.
I think copyrights need to have a lifetime on the order of the lifetime of the author. I see no reason to create a dynasty. I think patents are necessary too, and I agree with you that the lifetime of the patent should vary for different industries. I think the case for copyright is much stronger than the case for patents. Patents stimulate research. When you invent something, you accelerate the progress of human reason, but there is a good chance that someone else would have eventually discovered the same thing anyway. When you create a work of art, you have done something unique. If you had never created it, it would never have existed. Therefore, you deserve much more control over your work.
In a capitalist society, not all laws can benefit everyone. Some laws have to benefit the individual. It would benefit 99.999% of society to pass a law that appropriated all your property and shared it among everyone else, but it would be eminently unfair to you.
I find it unlikely that people are going to end up in Mexican prisons or beaten to death by the side of the road for violating copyright. Financially ruined, maybe. BTW, the problem with Dmitry is that he was not as much of a saint as the EFF made him out to be.
I believe that businesses have the right to choose what price they sell their product at. When you pay $15 for a movie you get more value than if you rent it for $5. If you pay $30 a month flat rate for cable you don't get to choose exactly what and when you watch. You have to pay for choice and convenience. Movies are hardly the only industry where this applies.
The most likely effect of Tivos is that the quality of programming will go down. This is due to the twin effects of a) an increased number of channels and b) less ad revenue to go around. The public won't tolerate huge rate increases (and they prefer flat rate to pay-per-use), so the budget for each channel is going to go down.
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