On the piracy/law-breaking side though, let's say that someone knowingly "makes available" a copy of my work in a distributable manner that I did not authorize [AKA the Internet]. My belief is that they just infringed my copyright.
Well, as another (wannabe) writer, I would argue that's not entirely correct. If someone makes my work available for download, they don't violate copyright until their software copies my work and sends it to someone else, thus actually performing the act of distribution. Up to that point, it's merely advertisement.
The problem, in this case, is that the RIAA has no proof of actual distribution. All they have is evidence that the materials were "made available", and so they're stuck trying to prove that such an act constitutes "distribution".
He should be. The odd thing about video game systems is that there's momentum at play. If you can't get a reasonable install base, then you lose exclusive developers, who will move on to greener pastures where they know they can make money. And if you lose exclusives, you lose a major reason to buy a particular console.
Getting out early and building an install base fast is *extremely* important to the success and longevity of a platform. Cutting prices on the PS3 may go a long way to helping them in that goal.
Of course, more and better games would also help, but the DS sold like hotcakes right after launch despite having a rather thin launch library, thanks in part to it's low price point, allowing people to justify the purchase even if there was only one or two games they were interested in.
The troubling aspect of Iran and nukes is not that they will use them, but that they will disseminate weapons materials and the weapons themselves to the many many many radical terrorist bands of wing-nuts that they support.
I hate to break it to you, but determined individuals have been able to get those materials from Russia, India, Pakistan, and probably China for years. This is hardly a new situation, and Iran acquiring nuclear capability won't change it much.
Encryption is used so that A can send a message to B in such a way that C cannot intercept and read what the message is. DRM sets B:= C, thus defeating the purpose of encryption. It is therefore a logical impossibility.
Actually, this is incorrect. Using more traditional notation, you have Alice, Bob, and Eve. Alice wishes to securely send a message to Bob, and Eve is listening in.
In the case of AACS, Alice is the movie studio. Eve is the viewer. Bob, however, is not Eve. Bob is the *video playback device*.
Further, Bob and Alice share a private key (the player key, to be specific). And so it's relatively easy for Alice to encrypt the message with some key K and then encrypt that key with Bob's private key and include that as part of the message (this is precisely how AACS works).
The problem, here, is that Bob's private key has been compromised. And, as a software player, it's not clear to me that there's any solution to that problem, since the keys must be held in memory at some point (perhaps TPM addresses this?). Of course, you could always have a hardware dongle that was responsible for performing the decryption (and thus contains the player key).
"Software" may be copyrightable, however, Microsoft claims that an installation CD is not software.
No, Microsoft claims that an installation CD is not 'Software' in the context of patent law. They've made no claims regarding 'Software' as it is defined with respect to copyright law.
They are just a very large number, which would be more akin to an "concept" or "idea" -- things that are explicitly not copyrightable (section 102 b).
Well, if you're going to try and take that stance, then this is true whether the software has been installed or not. The software is still "just a very large number" whether it's been installed or not, no? OTOH, the courts clearly don't agree with that view, having ruled that software is a copyrightable work.
Hell, if you really want to get technical, a software program is really just a series of machine instructions. And as we all know, a list of instructions (such as a recipe) is not subject to copyright protection.
There's nothing dangerous about that position at all. The bits on those disks, whether you call the aggregate "software" or not, are still copyrighted.
Their suggestion is simply that, until you combine those bits with a computer, the software does not comprise a tangible invention, and thus can't be patented.
I don't know where you got your information, but the moon has - at some point in it's orbit - the same relative velocity as the earth with regard to mars. This is unavoidable, as the moon orbits the earth, if you'll recall. Launching at the appropriate time will ensure no loss with regard to the moon's orbit. However, with 1/6th the gravity well, the same amount of energy will result in a higher velocity, or less energy the same, with regard to a trip to mars from there as compared to the earth. It's just math. And of course, there is no air resistance, no weather, and little air traffic to contend with.
Okay, perhaps I'm missing something, but in order to launch from the Moon to Mars, you need to get fuel to the Moon first. You can't make fuel on the Moon, after all. There's nothing to make it from. So you have to lift it out of Earth's gravity well. So, let's say you do that. So you burn a bunch of fuel to get a bunch more fuel out of Earth's gravity well and deposit it on the moon. Then, you launch from the Moon, burning yet more fuel to climb out of the Moon's gravity well, and a bunch more to make the shot to Mars.
The were successful with the aid of outside input.
That's right. According to Wikipedia, the microbes in the soil depleted oxygen from the atmosphere. The resulting CO2 was then absorbed by the concrete in the structure. Sounds like a pretty important detail, right? Well, those are the kinds of things we should probably solve here, on the ground, before we start building up fantastic plans about moon cities and mars bases. After all, unless you want to be constantly shipping water, gases and food supplies to these bases, a decidedly expensive proposition, you probably want them to be at least somewhat self-sustaining.
Plenty of folks with a decent background say that there is much to be gained by making the moon an intermediate step.
And there are plenty who don't. For example, this fellow feels that "Currently, this author believes that there are few, if any, efficient reasons to use the Moon as a stepping stone for going to Mars", since "Mars is a planet with an atmosphere and resources that preclude the Moon from acting as a relevant analogue, and our current space program is quite adept at operating spacecraft in the vacuum of space for timespans that double the most modest estimate of the one-way transit time to Mars."
Perhaps you have some material which counters these points in some meaningful way, rather than simply appealing to authority?
Secondly, you're a Canadian, so I do not see why it concerns you.
Because, like it or not, the United States is our best hope for getting humanity into space. So I'd rather they didn't waste 20 years putting a man back on the moon when it is, IMHO, and the opinion of many others, a waste of time, energy, and resources.
Why? Colonizing the moon is a drastically different undertaking from colonizing Mars. The moon is essentially a vacuum. It's cold. It has no useful resources to speak of (and no, He3 won't be useful any time soon). 1/6th Earth's gravity. And it's fairly close.
Meanwhile, Mars has water. And abundance of minerals. A thin atmosphere containing useful gases. A surface temperature that actually breaks the freezing point occasionally. Double the gravity of the moon. And it's so far away that getting there has proved to be a surprisingly difficult undertaking.
Honestly, the idea that colonization of the Moon will tell use anything useful about colonizing Mars is, frankly, silly. The methods that would be used for the two projects are *completely* different. Meanwhile, we can't even build a self-contained biosphere on *Earth*! Maybe we should try tackling that drastically simpler task before we start planning Moon bases.
LOL, I love how a contentless post like this gets modded up insightful. Insightful how? You haven't listed any good reasons why returning to the moon is worth it. You haven't even provided references to books, websites, or other resources which cover the topic.
Frankly, it sounds to me like just another round of pork from a President and party that has been damaged by the Iraq war. After all, much of the Republican base is located in states with NASA facilities (California and Maryland excepted).
Besides, the plan is so long-term that I'll be very surprised if it survives the next three Presidential terms.
However, way too many people bitch and whine about how much overhead exceptions take so expect to see more crashing asserts.
Absolutely it requires overhead. Specifically, in the need to write exception handling code. And every additional line of code you introduce is another line of code that needs to be tested. Worse, error handling code is precisely the kind of code that's the hardest to test, as the conditions for triggering it are so godawful difficult to manufacture. This would be why the vast majority of untested code in any product is in error handling code. Anyone who's ever done code coverage analysis on any non-trivial product understands this.
And this is assuming you can recover from the error in the first place. In many cases, an exception means that you simply *cannot* recover (how do you plan to recover from an out-of-memory error, precisely?).
The fact is, in what I would guess is the majority of cases, your best error handling is a single exception handler right at the top that sends an error report and terminates the program. Yes, it's crude, but odds are, your specific error management code wouldn't be able to do much better, anyway.
whenever something like this comes up a bunch of people who can't be bothered to actually read the journal articles but think they are entitled to second guess the people who have pipe up and complain
and you rebut with:
Scientists are the only ones who should be allowed to comment.
The funny thing is, your statement has *absolutely nothing to do* with what the GP stated. And the GP is right: people who argue from a position of ignorance should, in fact, remove themselves from the debate, because they are only adding more noise to the already nearly drowned-out signal. That doesn't mean "exclude all non-scientists". It means "exclude ignorance", and I fail to see what is wrong with that.
The difference is that movies try to make thier money back on the theatrical release prior to being sold for home viewing on DVD.
Sorry dude, but that's pure bull. Reality is that, back in 2003, 60 percent of Hollywood income came from DVD sales. *60 percent*. That's *massive*. And given the expansion in sales and rentals of TV shows, in addition to movies, this number has probably only increased.
Hah, wow, you're quite the optimist.:) Basic broadband is available to, what, ~40% of American households? And FIOS is a mere fraction of this. Further, there are many cable companies who aren't even bothering with FIOS, instead betting on switched digital to solve their bandwidth problems.
In short, there is no way FIOS will have any significant effect on HD or the overall content distribution industry. The penetration is simply too low, and there's no way it'll grow fast enough to have any sizeable near-term effect.
Great, but unless the DVR is supplied by your cable/satellite company the signal is not coming in digitally so bits will always get transcoded. Without CableCard support the DVR has no knowledge of how to decode the digital signal, the cable box decodes it and outputs analog which the DVR just reencodes. Cable company supplised boxes generally suck, so until TiVo gets CableCard support the majority of people will still be reencoding the digital stream.
Not for HD, it does not. There does not exist consumer-level gear that can perform analog capture and real-time encoding of HD material. None.
What the hell are you talking about? For one, there is *NO* HD-DVR out there that encodes the material it's storing. None. Zero. Nada. There's simply too much video to make that realistic. Every one of these machines simply demodulates the QAM, pulls out the MPEG stream, and saves it to disk. That's it. No quality loss whatsoever.
Second, storage is a solved problem. Harddisks get bigger every single day. It's simply not an issue. Granted, existing DVRs are a little lean on storage, but that will change with time (my Myth box at home has 250GB, and there are many with 1TB+ setups).
Third, the very idea of Internet distribution of HD, which can be upwards of 7 *gigabytes per hour*, is simply laughable. There's no way in hell that would get popular enough to sway the HD-DVD/Blu-ray battle in any way whatsoever.
Wow, lighten up a little. It's trash entertainment, to be sure. But it's only that. Entertainment. And even Shakespeare new that good entertainment didn't necessarily imply high-brow.
I think Internet distribution will have won the war or come very close
Sorry dude, but that's just ridiculous. Internet distribution will be (heck, already is) certainly interesting for SD material, but for HD, there is no damned way Internet distribution will make any inroads. Or did you really want to download 25GB of data?
And this is ignoring the fact that broadband penetration in the US is still relatively dismal.
Slashdot Mirror
On the piracy/law-breaking side though, let's say that someone knowingly "makes available" a copy of my work in a distributable manner that I did not authorize [AKA the Internet]. My belief is that they just infringed my copyright.
Well, as another (wannabe) writer, I would argue that's not entirely correct. If someone makes my work available for download, they don't violate copyright until their software copies my work and sends it to someone else, thus actually performing the act of distribution. Up to that point, it's merely advertisement.
The problem, in this case, is that the RIAA has no proof of actual distribution. All they have is evidence that the materials were "made available", and so they're stuck trying to prove that such an act constitutes "distribution".
He should be. The odd thing about video game systems is that there's momentum at play. If you can't get a reasonable install base, then you lose exclusive developers, who will move on to greener pastures where they know they can make money. And if you lose exclusives, you lose a major reason to buy a particular console.
Getting out early and building an install base fast is *extremely* important to the success and longevity of a platform. Cutting prices on the PS3 may go a long way to helping them in that goal.
Of course, more and better games would also help, but the DS sold like hotcakes right after launch despite having a rather thin launch library, thanks in part to it's low price point, allowing people to justify the purchase even if there was only one or two games they were interested in.
What do you call this???
And interesting question available for study?
The troubling aspect of Iran and nukes is not that they will use them, but that they will disseminate weapons materials and the weapons themselves to the many many many radical terrorist bands of wing-nuts that they support.
I hate to break it to you, but determined individuals have been able to get those materials from Russia, India, Pakistan, and probably China for years. This is hardly a new situation, and Iran acquiring nuclear capability won't change it much.
Encryption is used so that A can send a message to B in such a way that C cannot intercept and read what the message is. DRM sets B := C, thus defeating the purpose of encryption. It is therefore a logical impossibility.
Actually, this is incorrect. Using more traditional notation, you have Alice, Bob, and Eve. Alice wishes to securely send a message to Bob, and Eve is listening in.
In the case of AACS, Alice is the movie studio. Eve is the viewer. Bob, however, is not Eve. Bob is the *video playback device*.
Further, Bob and Alice share a private key (the player key, to be specific). And so it's relatively easy for Alice to encrypt the message with some key K and then encrypt that key with Bob's private key and include that as part of the message (this is precisely how AACS works).
The problem, here, is that Bob's private key has been compromised. And, as a software player, it's not clear to me that there's any solution to that problem, since the keys must be held in memory at some point (perhaps TPM addresses this?). Of course, you could always have a hardware dongle that was responsible for performing the decryption (and thus contains the player key).
"Software" may be copyrightable, however, Microsoft claims that an installation CD is not software.
No, Microsoft claims that an installation CD is not 'Software' in the context of patent law. They've made no claims regarding 'Software' as it is defined with respect to copyright law.
They are just a very large number, which would be more akin to an "concept" or "idea" -- things that are explicitly not copyrightable (section 102 b).
Well, if you're going to try and take that stance, then this is true whether the software has been installed or not. The software is still "just a very large number" whether it's been installed or not, no? OTOH, the courts clearly don't agree with that view, having ruled that software is a copyrightable work.
Hell, if you really want to get technical, a software program is really just a series of machine instructions. And as we all know, a list of instructions (such as a recipe) is not subject to copyright protection.
There's nothing dangerous about that position at all. The bits on those disks, whether you call the aggregate "software" or not, are still copyrighted.
Their suggestion is simply that, until you combine those bits with a computer, the software does not comprise a tangible invention, and thus can't be patented.
I don't know where you got your information, but the moon has - at some point in it's orbit - the same relative velocity as the earth with regard to mars. This is unavoidable, as the moon orbits the earth, if you'll recall. Launching at the appropriate time will ensure no loss with regard to the moon's orbit. However, with 1/6th the gravity well, the same amount of energy will result in a higher velocity, or less energy the same, with regard to a trip to mars from there as compared to the earth. It's just math. And of course, there is no air resistance, no weather, and little air traffic to contend with.
Okay, perhaps I'm missing something, but in order to launch from the Moon to Mars, you need to get fuel to the Moon first. You can't make fuel on the Moon, after all. There's nothing to make it from. So you have to lift it out of Earth's gravity well. So, let's say you do that. So you burn a bunch of fuel to get a bunch more fuel out of Earth's gravity well and deposit it on the moon. Then, you launch from the Moon, burning yet more fuel to climb out of the Moon's gravity well, and a bunch more to make the shot to Mars.
So, tell me... where is the savings, here?
The were successful with the aid of outside input.
That's right. According to Wikipedia, the microbes in the soil depleted oxygen from the atmosphere. The resulting CO2 was then absorbed by the concrete in the structure. Sounds like a pretty important detail, right? Well, those are the kinds of things we should probably solve here, on the ground, before we start building up fantastic plans about moon cities and mars bases. After all, unless you want to be constantly shipping water, gases and food supplies to these bases, a decidedly expensive proposition, you probably want them to be at least somewhat self-sustaining.
Plenty of folks with a decent background say that there is much to be gained by making the moon an intermediate step.
And there are plenty who don't. For example, this fellow feels that "Currently, this author believes that there are few, if any, efficient reasons to use the Moon as a stepping stone for going to Mars", since "Mars is a planet with an atmosphere and resources that preclude the Moon from acting as a relevant analogue, and our current space program is quite adept at operating spacecraft in the vacuum of space for timespans that double the most modest estimate of the one-way transit time to Mars."
Perhaps you have some material which counters these points in some meaningful way, rather than simply appealing to authority?
Secondly, you're a Canadian, so I do not see why it concerns you.
Because, like it or not, the United States is our best hope for getting humanity into space. So I'd rather they didn't waste 20 years putting a man back on the moon when it is, IMHO, and the opinion of many others, a waste of time, energy, and resources.
The moon is the first step.
Why? Colonizing the moon is a drastically different undertaking from colonizing Mars. The moon is essentially a vacuum. It's cold. It has no useful resources to speak of (and no, He3 won't be useful any time soon). 1/6th Earth's gravity. And it's fairly close.
Meanwhile, Mars has water. And abundance of minerals. A thin atmosphere containing useful gases. A surface temperature that actually breaks the freezing point occasionally. Double the gravity of the moon. And it's so far away that getting there has proved to be a surprisingly difficult undertaking.
Honestly, the idea that colonization of the Moon will tell use anything useful about colonizing Mars is, frankly, silly. The methods that would be used for the two projects are *completely* different. Meanwhile, we can't even build a self-contained biosphere on *Earth*! Maybe we should try tackling that drastically simpler task before we start planning Moon bases.
LOL, I love how a contentless post like this gets modded up insightful. Insightful how? You haven't listed any good reasons why returning to the moon is worth it. You haven't even provided references to books, websites, or other resources which cover the topic.
Frankly, it sounds to me like just another round of pork from a President and party that has been damaged by the Iraq war. After all, much of the Republican base is located in states with NASA facilities (California and Maryland excepted).
Besides, the plan is so long-term that I'll be very surprised if it survives the next three Presidential terms.
However, way too many people bitch and whine about how much overhead exceptions take so expect to see more crashing asserts.
Absolutely it requires overhead. Specifically, in the need to write exception handling code. And every additional line of code you introduce is another line of code that needs to be tested. Worse, error handling code is precisely the kind of code that's the hardest to test, as the conditions for triggering it are so godawful difficult to manufacture. This would be why the vast majority of untested code in any product is in error handling code. Anyone who's ever done code coverage analysis on any non-trivial product understands this.
And this is assuming you can recover from the error in the first place. In many cases, an exception means that you simply *cannot* recover (how do you plan to recover from an out-of-memory error, precisely?).
The fact is, in what I would guess is the majority of cases, your best error handling is a single exception handler right at the top that sends an error report and terminates the program. Yes, it's crude, but odds are, your specific error management code wouldn't be able to do much better, anyway.
Maybe you should explore RealClimate. They specifically discuss the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, Antarctic Climate, and the supposed problems with the Hockey Stick Graph.
But, hey, god forbid you should actually do your own research.
Hmm, isn't this interesting... the GP says:
whenever something like this comes up a bunch of people who can't be bothered to actually read the journal articles but think they are entitled to second guess the people who have pipe up and complain
and you rebut with:
Scientists are the only ones who should be allowed to comment.
The funny thing is, your statement has *absolutely nothing to do* with what the GP stated. And the GP is right: people who argue from a position of ignorance should, in fact, remove themselves from the debate, because they are only adding more noise to the already nearly drowned-out signal. That doesn't mean "exclude all non-scientists". It means "exclude ignorance", and I fail to see what is wrong with that.
The difference is that movies try to make thier money back on the theatrical release prior to being sold for home viewing on DVD.
Sorry dude, but that's pure bull. Reality is that, back in 2003, 60 percent of Hollywood income came from DVD sales. *60 percent*. That's *massive*. And given the expansion in sales and rentals of TV shows, in addition to movies, this number has probably only increased.
However, what they did is akin to placing graffiti around the city and they *should* be charged and held accountable for such.
Bullshit. Graffiti is illegal because it damages property. At worst, these people should be charged with littering.
It's a gimmick, plain and simple, and not a very good one at that
That's funny... you could just as easily be talking about the DS. And yet, look at how wrong people were about that...
Hah, wow, you're quite the optimist. :) Basic broadband is available to, what, ~40% of American households? And FIOS is a mere fraction of this. Further, there are many cable companies who aren't even bothering with FIOS, instead betting on switched digital to solve their bandwidth problems.
In short, there is no way FIOS will have any significant effect on HD or the overall content distribution industry. The penetration is simply too low, and there's no way it'll grow fast enough to have any sizeable near-term effect.
Great, but unless the DVR is supplied by your cable/satellite company the signal is not coming in digitally so bits will always get transcoded. Without CableCard support the DVR has no knowledge of how to decode the digital signal, the cable box decodes it and outputs analog which the DVR just reencodes. Cable company supplised boxes generally suck, so until TiVo gets CableCard support the majority of people will still be reencoding the digital stream.
Not for HD, it does not. There does not exist consumer-level gear that can perform analog capture and real-time encoding of HD material. None.
Actually, according to your post, your thesis is that "the Bluray vs. HD-DVD war won't matter". Are you changing your mind now?
What the hell are you talking about? For one, there is *NO* HD-DVR out there that encodes the material it's storing. None. Zero. Nada. There's simply too much video to make that realistic. Every one of these machines simply demodulates the QAM, pulls out the MPEG stream, and saves it to disk. That's it. No quality loss whatsoever.
Second, storage is a solved problem. Harddisks get bigger every single day. It's simply not an issue. Granted, existing DVRs are a little lean on storage, but that will change with time (my Myth box at home has 250GB, and there are many with 1TB+ setups).
Third, the very idea of Internet distribution of HD, which can be upwards of 7 *gigabytes per hour*, is simply laughable. There's no way in hell that would get popular enough to sway the HD-DVD/Blu-ray battle in any way whatsoever.
Wow, lighten up a little. It's trash entertainment, to be sure. But it's only that. Entertainment. And even Shakespeare new that good entertainment didn't necessarily imply high-brow.
I think Internet distribution will have won the war or come very close
Sorry dude, but that's just ridiculous. Internet distribution will be (heck, already is) certainly interesting for SD material, but for HD, there is no damned way Internet distribution will make any inroads. Or did you really want to download 25GB of data?
And this is ignoring the fact that broadband penetration in the US is still relatively dismal.