Re:May not be intended to be a solution
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IsoHunt Shut Down?
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· Score: 1
If your case revolves around proving that you were harmed (as all civil cases do), then it does matter.
That *might* come to play when computing damages (though I doubt it), but will have no effect on the course of the trial (ie, it will not come into play when considering guilt or innocence). Either Joe is guilty of infringement or he's not. What other people are doing has no bearing on that.
Furthermore, the statutory damages per infringement are *enormous* for your average joe... additional damages are entirely punative, and so do nothing to further their cause (discourage piracy), as the statutory damages are likely more than enough of a deterrant. Moreover, damages are only related to the activities of the infringing individual. You can't just go sue Joe for piracy and state that, because you lose a billion dollars a year from worldwide piracy, you want a billion dollars from Joe. I would expect all you can get from him is the damages his infringements directly caused, and those damages are the same irrespective of other cases of infringement.
you single one of them out and claim that they're causing you irreparable harm, while the other 9 are doing the same thing? The harm must not be that severe, right?
Wrong. Perhaps you picked Joe because he was easy to catch. Or you think the case is easiest to litigate. Or your goal is to set an example. The court doesn't give a damn one way or another. Joe is either guilty or he's not, and is either for liable for calculated or statutory damages plus any punative damages, or he is not. Whether or not you sued Aunt May before hand should have no bearing on the case.
Re:May not be intended to be a solution
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IsoHunt Shut Down?
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· Score: 3, Informative
but when it comes to proving your case, it's the effort that counts.
No, it's not. Copyright is not like trademarks. They don't run out if you don't enforce them. And the only evidence you need to convinct someone is proof they infringed. Past enforcement efforts have no bearing.
So all these guys are doing is harrassing people and making themselves look worse. Is there a better solution? I don't know. But it's pretty clear that the shotgun lawsuit approach simply doesn't work.
*That* is an enormous assumption. We have encryption technology today that, unless it's flawed, would make works unbreakable by anything but quantum computers. And I mean unbreakable in the sense that the universe will grow old and die before the encryption is cracked.
If the system gave me full freedom to do what I wanted with the media (including play it back on systems I've built, such as my MythTV box), with the exception of distributing illegal copies, and the protection expired after the copyright ran out, I would have no problems with it.
Problem is, such a system is most probably impossible to build. Without full control of the hardware from soup to nuts, there's no way to plug the analog hole, and without that, there's always a way to distribute the material (unless you can come up with a watermarking scheme that's unbreakable). This is, of course, why HDCP was invented...
Oooh, look at you! So brave, fighting the good fight against those copyright hating, communist loving hippie slashdotters! Man, you're a fucking hero. Truly a modern Robin Hood, fighting for those poor, helpless corporations and their downtrodden shareholders.
See, and I don't. Why? Well, first off, DRM allows for what amounts to unbound copyrights. After all, if I can't read, copy, edit, or redistribute a public-domain work, what use is it to me? Copyright is supposed to be a *bounded* contract between the copyright holder and society. DRM is just an attempt at an end-run around the rules.
Secondly, I demand my right to shift materials that I've rightfully purchased onto other media. For example, I have a MythTV installation. On it, I have my entire music collection, not to mention a mass of recorded video, and eventually I plan to have my DVD collection ripped as well. DRM means I can no longer do any of these things, which restricts my ability to enjoy the content I've purchased.
So no, I don't believe in DRM. Do I believe that artists should be compensated for their work? Absolutely. They put in significant effort creating the media I enjoy. But I don't like being treated like a criminal in my own home, and I don't like the artists wiggling out of their part of the copyright bargain.
We already have a fundamental level of health care. Go to the emergency room, you get health care.
Oh that's just fucking brilliant. Design the system so it discourages the poor from getting proper healthcare until they're so sick they need the emergency room. Yup, that's a *great* way to reduce the overall cost of healthcare for everyone. I bet it's great for the economy, too... all those sick people who aren't quite sick enough to go to emerg, but can't afford to go to the doctor.
It's an interesting idea, but the problem is that when Bob makes his observations, the values the particles take are entirely random. Remember, Bob doesn't get to select the values. It is simply that whatever values his particles take will be reflected on the other entangled particle in the pair when an observation on that particle is performed.
*However*, what this *is* useful for is generating a one-time pad. Suppose you have Alice and Bob wishing to communication 100% securely. You take a source of, say, entangled photons and send them to Alice and Bob. Alice then observes the particle at time t, generating some random value x. Bob, at time t' > t then performs an observation on his particle, and gets the same random value x. Meanwhile, Alice takes a bit from the message she wishes to encrypt, XOR's it with the value x, and sends it to Bob, who then performs the same operation. Voila! Bob has the message. And because of the observer effect and the no-cloning theorem, there is no way for Eve to gain access to the pad.
Note, there was no FTL communication, here. The information to be communicated is in the message itself, which can only be transmitted in a classical sense, limited to the speed of light. What QE allows is for two individuals to have a synchronized source of random data.
Well that's quite the assumption. It seems more likely, to me, that if a job couldn't be outsourced, it may simply not exist, because the company can't afford to pay the domestic salaries necessary.
Similarly, me pirating a copy of, say, a $1000 program is not a lost sale, because without piracy, I wouldn't have been able to afford the software anyway.
If you don't want to talk to people who have some degree of ignorance
I have absolutely no problem with that. My problem is that, despite providing you with a number of references which should help enlighten you, you persist in your beliefs. You continue to deny everything I'm saying, rather than reading the literature.
To start off, I'm not denying that QE exists. It does. It's been demonstrated. What I'm trying to explain to you is that it cannot be used to send a signal. Now, from the sounds of it, your entire understanding of QM is based on popsci articles (this isn't a slight... this is the case for most people, myself included, to some degree). Unfortunately, these articles are notoriously inaccurate, and typically simplify things to the point of non-sense.
For example, you seem to think that, given two particles A and B which can represent two states, 0 and 1, if Alice measures A, then particle B immediately changes. This is not the case. It works like this: A and B exist in a superposition of states 0 and 1. When Alice measures A, A takes a definite value randomly, either 0 or 1. Later, when Bob measures B, it will take on the same value.
The key here is that Bob must measure B. But there is a problem: there is no way for Bob to tell if the value of B is a result of Alice performing a measurement, thus causing the waveform to collapse, or because Bob's measurement is the one which caused the collapse. Consequently, there is no way to pass information from Alice to Bob instantaneously, as Bob cannot deduce if Alice has measured A.
And this is why I brought up quantum cloning. *If* you could clone particle B multiple times, such that all the clones are entangled with A, then one could communicate as follows: Alice measures A, causing the waveform to collapse. Bob then proceeds to measure B and all the clones. If Alice was the one which caused the waveform to collapse, then Bob would observe the clones as having the same value. However, if Alice did not collapse the waveform, then the clones would each take some state randomly. The problem is that, as per the article, quantum cloning is not possible.
It's not so much that someone is twiddling particle A and someone else is measuring particle B; it's more like someone is making measurements of particle A, and someone else is measuring particle B, and because of entanglement, those measurements are going to correlate some percentage of the time...
Which brings us back to quantum cloning. *If* you could clone a quantum state, particle B could be cloned. Then, if the waveform of particle A is collapsed, one could measure B and all of it's clones, and based on statistics deduce whether or not particle A had been "twiddled" (since >50% of the clones would collapse to the same state, due to the entanglement with A). Unfortunately, the No Cloning theorem (which I also linked to) makes this impossible.
So you're left with a single particle B who's state you measure. But because of good ol' Heisenburg, there's no way to deduce if the state of B after the waveform collapses is due to manipulation of particle A, or simply random.
And I'm telling you, no, QE does not allow communication.
Thanks to the aforementioned result, Bob, the intended receiver of the signal, statistically can't tell that Alice's observation is what resulted in the waveform collapsing to specific state (versus it collapsing to some random state). The only way this can be done is by cloning the quantum state on Bob's end and then observing all the clones. If >50% collapse to a particular state, odds are, it was due to Alice's observation. Unforunately, there's a No Cloning Theorem which makes this impossible.
Please, if you want to counter what I'm saying, go educate yourself first. At this point, it's clear you're speaking from a position of ignorance.
but quantum entanglement suggests (even demonstrates) that some info is transmitted faster than lightspeed
No, it doesn't. There is a No communication theorem, which basically outlaws the possibility of transmitting *any* information (instantly or otherwise) via QE.
*sigh* Yes, I know, I was simplifying things. The current thinking is that, odds are, gravity propagates at the speed of light. It may propagate slower. It almost certainly does not propagate faster (lest our current cosmological theories fall flat on their face, as they make the fundamental assumption that information can not travel faster than c), and *that* is, I think, the real brainf*ck for most people.
It's simple: as far as I know (and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), instantaneous gravity would allow instantaneous transmission of information. This directly contradicts relativity, and so I think it's pretty presumptuous to assume that gravity propagates faster than c.
And you know what's really weird? If the Sun just winked out of existence right this minute, the Earth would continue in it's orbit for 8 minutes before flying off into space. Why? Because gravity also propagates at the speed of light.
No, they mean the largest individual star cluster. We've imaged galaxies and quasars *much* farther out, but individual clusters of stars? That's much more difficult.
1) The article begin with "A University of B.C. astronomer has discovered the farthest cluster of stars ever seen by a human eye " Wait, they don't use they eye, but the Hubble telescope in orbite with a "digicam" on it !
That's a perfectly accurate statement. They claim to have imaged the furthest individual cluster of stars. It is, therefore, the oldest cluster of stars ever seen by the human eye. Granted, it was probably on a computer after being exposed by a CCD, but it's still the furthest cluster we have ever individually observed.
No, not one bilion years back in time, but a billion years and two months.
What part of "the cluster as it appeared to them two months ago" don't you understand? They made the observation two months ago. Therefore, if the light took a billion years to get there, then the light was emitted a billion years ago. Regardless, this is just pointless pedantism.
This is obviouly the colors shift of the duppler effect,
Umm... no. This isn't "obviously" the duppler (sic) effect. Main Sequence stars redden as they age. The theory is that, a billion years ago, stars might be, on average, younger and hotter. So his supposition is that the cluster of stars will be, by and large, younger, bluer stars. Furthermore, the hubble constant is likely known at that distance, meaning the redshift can be largely compensated for before making conclusions regarding age, chemical makeup, and so forth.
Honestly, if you're gonna be a smart ass, the least you could do is research your claims first.
It is worth nothing, though, that even outside of engineering, it's not at all without precent to refer to such a controller as a six-axis system. For example, the NASA SimLabs VMS package is described as "the only large six-axis motion system in the world". And that was just my first quick Googling attempt.
Point being, you can accuse Sony of a lot of things, but their controller is accurately named (even if it is a cheap knock-off of the Wiimote).
Slashdot Mirror
If your case revolves around proving that you were harmed (as all civil cases do), then it does matter.
That *might* come to play when computing damages (though I doubt it), but will have no effect on the course of the trial (ie, it will not come into play when considering guilt or innocence). Either Joe is guilty of infringement or he's not. What other people are doing has no bearing on that.
Furthermore, the statutory damages per infringement are *enormous* for your average joe... additional damages are entirely punative, and so do nothing to further their cause (discourage piracy), as the statutory damages are likely more than enough of a deterrant. Moreover, damages are only related to the activities of the infringing individual. You can't just go sue Joe for piracy and state that, because you lose a billion dollars a year from worldwide piracy, you want a billion dollars from Joe. I would expect all you can get from him is the damages his infringements directly caused, and those damages are the same irrespective of other cases of infringement.
you single one of them out and claim that they're causing you irreparable harm, while the other 9 are doing the same thing? The harm must not be that severe, right?
Wrong. Perhaps you picked Joe because he was easy to catch. Or you think the case is easiest to litigate. Or your goal is to set an example. The court doesn't give a damn one way or another. Joe is either guilty or he's not, and is either for liable for calculated or statutory damages plus any punative damages, or he is not. Whether or not you sued Aunt May before hand should have no bearing on the case.
but when it comes to proving your case, it's the effort that counts.
No, it's not. Copyright is not like trademarks. They don't run out if you don't enforce them. And the only evidence you need to convinct someone is proof they infringed. Past enforcement efforts have no bearing.
So all these guys are doing is harrassing people and making themselves look worse. Is there a better solution? I don't know. But it's pretty clear that the shotgun lawsuit approach simply doesn't work.
Why, the rich land owners and the aristocracy, of course. Well, assuming this was the year 1500 and not the year 2007...
Aha, yeah, I fully admit I missed that part. Although, I believe my comments regarding copyright lifetime are still very much relevant.
*That* is an enormous assumption. We have encryption technology today that, unless it's flawed, would make works unbreakable by anything but quantum computers. And I mean unbreakable in the sense that the universe will grow old and die before the encryption is cracked.
So, would you still object?
If the system gave me full freedom to do what I wanted with the media (including play it back on systems I've built, such as my MythTV box), with the exception of distributing illegal copies, and the protection expired after the copyright ran out, I would have no problems with it.
Problem is, such a system is most probably impossible to build. Without full control of the hardware from soup to nuts, there's no way to plug the analog hole, and without that, there's always a way to distribute the material (unless you can come up with a watermarking scheme that's unbreakable). This is, of course, why HDCP was invented...
Oooh, look at you! So brave, fighting the good fight against those copyright hating, communist loving hippie slashdotters! Man, you're a fucking hero. Truly a modern Robin Hood, fighting for those poor, helpless corporations and their downtrodden shareholders.
Sure, I support the ability to use DRM.
See, and I don't. Why? Well, first off, DRM allows for what amounts to unbound copyrights. After all, if I can't read, copy, edit, or redistribute a public-domain work, what use is it to me? Copyright is supposed to be a *bounded* contract between the copyright holder and society. DRM is just an attempt at an end-run around the rules.
Secondly, I demand my right to shift materials that I've rightfully purchased onto other media. For example, I have a MythTV installation. On it, I have my entire music collection, not to mention a mass of recorded video, and eventually I plan to have my DVD collection ripped as well. DRM means I can no longer do any of these things, which restricts my ability to enjoy the content I've purchased.
So no, I don't believe in DRM. Do I believe that artists should be compensated for their work? Absolutely. They put in significant effort creating the media I enjoy. But I don't like being treated like a criminal in my own home, and I don't like the artists wiggling out of their part of the copyright bargain.
We already have a fundamental level of health care. Go to the emergency room, you get health care.
Oh that's just fucking brilliant. Design the system so it discourages the poor from getting proper healthcare until they're so sick they need the emergency room. Yup, that's a *great* way to reduce the overall cost of healthcare for everyone. I bet it's great for the economy, too... all those sick people who aren't quite sick enough to go to emerg, but can't afford to go to the doctor.
No, you idiot, it's:
step 3) Make her open the box
step 4) Profit!
It's an interesting idea, but the problem is that when Bob makes his observations, the values the particles take are entirely random. Remember, Bob doesn't get to select the values. It is simply that whatever values his particles take will be reflected on the other entangled particle in the pair when an observation on that particle is performed.
*However*, what this *is* useful for is generating a one-time pad. Suppose you have Alice and Bob wishing to communication 100% securely. You take a source of, say, entangled photons and send them to Alice and Bob. Alice then observes the particle at time t, generating some random value x. Bob, at time t' > t then performs an observation on his particle, and gets the same random value x. Meanwhile, Alice takes a bit from the message she wishes to encrypt, XOR's it with the value x, and sends it to Bob, who then performs the same operation. Voila! Bob has the message. And because of the observer effect and the no-cloning theorem, there is no way for Eve to gain access to the pad.
Note, there was no FTL communication, here. The information to be communicated is in the message itself, which can only be transmitted in a classical sense, limited to the speed of light. What QE allows is for two individuals to have a synchronized source of random data.
If the job could've been made here
Well that's quite the assumption. It seems more likely, to me, that if a job couldn't be outsourced, it may simply not exist, because the company can't afford to pay the domestic salaries necessary.
Similarly, me pirating a copy of, say, a $1000 program is not a lost sale, because without piracy, I wouldn't have been able to afford the software anyway.
Personally I think gravity is instantaneous
Oh, well if *you* say so... I take it you're perfectly happy with violating causality, then?
If you don't want to talk to people who have some degree of ignorance
I have absolutely no problem with that. My problem is that, despite providing you with a number of references which should help enlighten you, you persist in your beliefs. You continue to deny everything I'm saying, rather than reading the literature.
To start off, I'm not denying that QE exists. It does. It's been demonstrated. What I'm trying to explain to you is that it cannot be used to send a signal. Now, from the sounds of it, your entire understanding of QM is based on popsci articles (this isn't a slight... this is the case for most people, myself included, to some degree). Unfortunately, these articles are notoriously inaccurate, and typically simplify things to the point of non-sense.
For example, you seem to think that, given two particles A and B which can represent two states, 0 and 1, if Alice measures A, then particle B immediately changes. This is not the case. It works like this: A and B exist in a superposition of states 0 and 1. When Alice measures A, A takes a definite value randomly, either 0 or 1. Later, when Bob measures B, it will take on the same value.
The key here is that Bob must measure B. But there is a problem: there is no way for Bob to tell if the value of B is a result of Alice performing a measurement, thus causing the waveform to collapse, or because Bob's measurement is the one which caused the collapse. Consequently, there is no way to pass information from Alice to Bob instantaneously, as Bob cannot deduce if Alice has measured A.
And this is why I brought up quantum cloning. *If* you could clone particle B multiple times, such that all the clones are entangled with A, then one could communicate as follows: Alice measures A, causing the waveform to collapse. Bob then proceeds to measure B and all the clones. If Alice was the one which caused the waveform to collapse, then Bob would observe the clones as having the same value. However, if Alice did not collapse the waveform, then the clones would each take some state randomly. The problem is that, as per the article, quantum cloning is not possible.
So does that make sense?
It's not so much that someone is twiddling particle A and someone else is measuring particle B; it's more like someone is making measurements of particle A, and someone else is measuring particle B, and because of entanglement, those measurements are going to correlate some percentage of the time...
Which brings us back to quantum cloning. *If* you could clone a quantum state, particle B could be cloned. Then, if the waveform of particle A is collapsed, one could measure B and all of it's clones, and based on statistics deduce whether or not particle A had been "twiddled" (since >50% of the clones would collapse to the same state, due to the entanglement with A). Unfortunately, the No Cloning theorem (which I also linked to) makes this impossible.
So you're left with a single particle B who's state you measure. But because of good ol' Heisenburg, there's no way to deduce if the state of B after the waveform collapses is due to manipulation of particle A, or simply random.
Incidentally, feel free to read about the EPR Paradox, which essentially precludes instantaneous communication thanks to QE.
And I'm telling you, no, QE does not allow communication.
Thanks to the aforementioned result, Bob, the intended receiver of the signal, statistically can't tell that Alice's observation is what resulted in the waveform collapsing to specific state (versus it collapsing to some random state). The only way this can be done is by cloning the quantum state on Bob's end and then observing all the clones. If >50% collapse to a particular state, odds are, it was due to Alice's observation. Unforunately, there's a No Cloning Theorem which makes this impossible.
Please, if you want to counter what I'm saying, go educate yourself first. At this point, it's clear you're speaking from a position of ignorance.
but quantum entanglement suggests (even demonstrates) that some info is transmitted faster than lightspeed
No, it doesn't. There is a No communication theorem, which basically outlaws the possibility of transmitting *any* information (instantly or otherwise) via QE.
We don't know this.
*sigh* Yes, I know, I was simplifying things. The current thinking is that, odds are, gravity propagates at the speed of light. It may propagate slower. It almost certainly does not propagate faster (lest our current cosmological theories fall flat on their face, as they make the fundamental assumption that information can not travel faster than c), and *that* is, I think, the real brainf*ck for most people.
It's simple: as far as I know (and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), instantaneous gravity would allow instantaneous transmission of information. This directly contradicts relativity, and so I think it's pretty presumptuous to assume that gravity propagates faster than c.
It's used when quoting another individual, and indicates that typos or other errors are part of the quote, rather than being introduced by the quoter.
And you know what's really weird? If the Sun just winked out of existence right this minute, the Earth would continue in it's orbit for 8 minutes before flying off into space. Why? Because gravity also propagates at the speed of light.
No, they mean the largest individual star cluster. We've imaged galaxies and quasars *much* farther out, but individual clusters of stars? That's much more difficult.
1) The article begin with "A University of B.C. astronomer has discovered the farthest cluster of stars ever seen by a human eye " Wait, they don't use they eye, but the Hubble telescope in orbite with a "digicam" on it !
That's a perfectly accurate statement. They claim to have imaged the furthest individual cluster of stars. It is, therefore, the oldest cluster of stars ever seen by the human eye. Granted, it was probably on a computer after being exposed by a CCD, but it's still the furthest cluster we have ever individually observed.
No, not one bilion years back in time, but a billion years and two months.
What part of "the cluster as it appeared to them two months ago" don't you understand? They made the observation two months ago. Therefore, if the light took a billion years to get there, then the light was emitted a billion years ago. Regardless, this is just pointless pedantism.
This is obviouly the colors shift of the duppler effect,
Umm... no. This isn't "obviously" the duppler (sic) effect. Main Sequence stars redden as they age. The theory is that, a billion years ago, stars might be, on average, younger and hotter. So his supposition is that the cluster of stars will be, by and large, younger, bluer stars. Furthermore, the hubble constant is likely known at that distance, meaning the redshift can be largely compensated for before making conclusions regarding age, chemical makeup, and so forth.
Honestly, if you're gonna be a smart ass, the least you could do is research your claims first.
It is worth nothing, though, that even outside of engineering, it's not at all without precent to refer to such a controller as a six-axis system. For example, the NASA SimLabs VMS package is described as "the only large six-axis motion system in the world". And that was just my first quick Googling attempt.
Point being, you can accuse Sony of a lot of things, but their controller is accurately named (even if it is a cheap knock-off of the Wiimote).