Just look at Think Geek. Hey, there's a lot of cool stuff there. But who other than a corporate flunky can actually afford any of it? Geeks have to be rich now, to stay geeks. We're being driven to it.
There has always been a money element to geekiness. Computers cost money, and, in computers, geek value often equals cost. MIT has a lot of geeks, but well funded geeks - have you seen the cost of undergraduate tuition? The space program, one of the geekiest endeavors ever, was only possible because the Russians were trying to do it, and was funded with billions of tax dollars.
We often act like we are entering some geek utopia, that our technology is freeing us from the constraints of the body and letting us live in the empire of the mind. Instead, it is simply a good economy, and the money from a middle-class lifestyle that fuels our current lifestyles. It's often about the gadgets, not the knowledge, and when it is about the knowledge, you often have to spend $200 at O'Reilly just to get the basic knowledge to understand the free guides.
For an interesting take on the subject, check out The Guy I Almost Was, a web comic at e-sheep. It takes some time and a little bandwidth, but is well-worth the read.
I found that you could hightlight a phrase, then alt-click on the highlighted phrase, to search on more than one word. It's a interesting idea, to feed words to a search engine from a webpage, but the auto-googler, mentioned elsewhere in the thread, is a better idea.
That is the coolest trick I've seen in a long time.
To do it in MSIE 5.5 (which may work in other browsers) I made a bookmark to a random page, and put it in the "Links" folder (which is, for me, the folder that contains bookmarks displayed in the Links toolbar). This caused the link to appear in the toolbar. I then right-clicked, selected Properties, and pasted the code into the URL box. It warned me a few times that "javascript" was not a registered program, then let me click OK. Presto, I can highlight a word, click the "AutoGoogle" Link, and I get a Google search, and I can click Back for the previous page!
I only wish you had posted sooner in the thread, so you could have gotten some mod points and more visibility. Maybe you'll get refered in a Slashback.
As a side note, I went and downloaded the QuickClick program. In MSIE, it runs as a toolbar, and underlines some words in yellow. Not every word, as the commerical would lead me to belive, but only some words.
In my post, for instance, it underlines "Java", "QuickClick", "NBCi", and "Scientology". Clicking on an underlined word brings up a menu with a few links. For instance, "QuickClick"'s menu allows you to download it or go to the homepage. "Java" has links to the programming language, and "NBCi" has a menu two levels thick of news, stock info, analysis, etc.
For Scientology, it has two links, both to the Scientology magazine, Freedom.
NBCi.com seems to have come late to the game, but are trying hard. My favorite "drum up enthusiasm for a TV portal" commercial is for the Quickclick service.
You may have seen it. The NBCi spokeswoman walks dramatically on stage. Hundreds are in attendance, all with their own muted terminals. The screen behind her shows a HUGE display. She introduces the concept ("See a word, click it, and get information"), the people are estatic.
Every detail is perfect and hilarious.
The spokeswoman is the anti-geek - attractive, female, thinks Java is a drink, lips as red as Valentine's Day. All marketing, doesn't understand a line of code of the QuickClick tech.
She has to have an exagerated gesture for everything. The motion for "clicking" is not pointing (that was used for "seeing"), but instead Jazz Hands, or the motion of throwing away a basketball.
The people at their terminals are blasted by light as their screens turn into spotlights, or perhaps microwaves digesting metal.
One poor guy is so excited, you can see him squirming, barely unable to take his eyes off his personal terminal to ask "Any word?" He climaxes the answer, "Yes, Any Word!"
They thunder into spontaneous applause. One guy lifts his arms and face to the ceiling, as if to say "Thank You, God!" or perhaps "All Praise to the CEO of NBCi.com!"
Unfortunately, NBCi is a little late for the dot-com buzz. Still, I giggle a little everytime I see this commerical, and the thousands of cultists who dressed in their best outfits for the unveiling of the new tech.
With Scientology in the air, it even gets more interesting - old LRH's learning tech hinges on the idea that all misunderstandings are over misunderstood words. When you don't get a new subject, it is solely because you didn't understand a word (not because the material is hard, or doesn't make sense, or the teacher is awful). You are encouraged to look up all the words you didn't understand, and then you will understand.
The Church could directly license this "tech" for their own use. "Free will? What's that?" Click. "Being Clear enough to follow the teaching of LRH! I get it!" Further, the introduction of the "SciClick" tech would look a lot like the NBCi commerical, except that the spokeswoman would be replaced by David Miscavige in a sailor's outfit, with or without the lipstick.
Human reality is socially constructed. That is, most of the "facts" that determine our daily lives are socially constructed facts, which are true as long as enough people believe them to be true. The right to own property, the right to not be murdered, indeed the right to continue to live at all; all of these are socially constructed rights, which are true only as long as enough of us believe in them.
American society has created for itself a Mobius-like reality by privileging capital, or property rights, above all else. This has granted corporations the power to purchase the reality that best suits them, and corporations in turn recreate the reality that privileges money. Communities -- places, real or virtual, where people speak directly to each other, without corporate mediation -- are the only hope we have to reassert control over our own reality, and place it back in the hands of people, instead of the fictional entities we call corporations.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...
While Jefferson ultimately attributes the source of humanity's "inalienable rights" to the "Creator," he recognizes that the only way for humanity to maintain these rights is by self-governance. That is, whether you are granted rights by God or not is essentially irrelevant, since the actual exercise of those rights is a social phenomenon.
"Human rights" are fundamentally a social construct. Your individual right to continue to live is maintained only as long as there is not a more powerful individual or group who wishes to cause your death. Humans have no natural predators -- that is, no species other than humanity itself supports its existence by killing humans.
This puts us in the unusual position of being able to determine a large proportion of "reality" as we experience it. Obviously, if I jump off a tall building, I will likely be killed on impact with the ground, no matter how many people believe I won't be. Reality, and existence, for me, is over. But what this event means to the people who didn't actually jump off the building with me has yet to be constructed. What the majority of others think about this event will determine the socially constructed reality of the event. That is, "what actually happened" is determined by common agreement.
If enough people believe I was pushed off that building, the individual they believe pushed me will go to jail. Buried in that sentence are a whole host of other socially constructed "truths", among which are that pushing someone off a building is murder, that murder is wrong, and that society may physically and behaviorally confine those who commit murder. None of these things are fundamentally "true" to any greater extent than that they are made true by enough people believing in them.
Take a different example. I die of pancreatic cancer. As with the first example, it makes no difference to me whatsoever what caused this event, since I am dead. But again, the larger meaning of this event, the "what actually happened" has yet to be determined, and in this case, it may become a lot more complex. You see, before I died of pancreatic cancer, I was a small farmer in Colorado. To save costs, I accepted cakes of processed sewage sludge from New York City, which I used to fertilize my tree farm. This was legal, because American society, acting through the EPA, has determined that "sludge farming" is an acceptable way to dispose of combined human and industrial wastes, despite the fact that these sludge cakes contain extremely high concentrations of heavy metals, petroleum byproducts, and carcinogenic chemicals.
An autopsy determines that my pancreatic cancer was the result of high concentrations of nickel and lead in my body. The concentrations of nickel and lead in the soil of my farm are hundreds of times the base levels in other soil in the area. It takes little imagination to conclude that my death was a result of the toxic sludge that I've been using to fertilize my farm.
The physical facts of my death are now known. But the social reality of the event still has not been determined. Seeing a potential disaster in the works, SludgeCo, who were my source of toxic farm sludge, will inevitably swing the PR machine into action. Company spokes-people will insist that I chose, of my own free will, to use their safe, inexpensive fertilizer. They will point to other possible explanations of my cancer, and produce "independent" company-paid scientists to cast doubt on the link between heavy metals and cancer. "Grassroots" organizations of farmers, funded by the company, will protest that limiting the flow of cheap SludgeCo fertilizer will harm their ability to compete in the market, and damage the competitiveness of Colorado's agriculture industry.
The point of all this public relations work is to create a socially accepted "reality" which does not make SludgeCo a murderer. This process is the bedrock on which American society creates its reality. Laws are made by representatives. Representatives act based upon what they believe are the opinions of their constituents. Constituents base their beliefs on information provided to them by media, such as television, radio, and newspapers. And at every level of this process, the public relations industry intervenes to create the "reality" that best suits their client.
American society is essentially capitalist. Capital is another one of those social fictions which has effaced its own socially-constructed nature to the point that most people accept it as "real," in and of itself, and beyond their ability to control. Like murder, though, money has no reality beyond that which we collectively grant it. In American capitalism, money is exchangeable for property, and vice versa. The reality of money is founded in our belief that the ownership of property is a fundamental right. Communist revolutions all over the world have proven that individual ownership of property is not a fact of nature, but is a socially constructed reality that holds true only as long as a sufficient number of people believe in it. If a sufficient number of people believe that they own the property you previously considered "yours," then that becomes true.
The base belief in individual ownership of property means that in order to continue to live, each of us must obtain money to purchase the basic things that enable that. That is, I have to get food, and in order to get food away from those who "own" it, I have to give them money. So life, in a capitalist society, is subordinate to property. My life, and yours, is sustained only at the pleasure of a social fiction. Because of our assent to this form of reality, those who hold the most property may dictate the views of the largest number of people, which in turn recreates and reinforces the reality which enables those property-holders to continue to hold property.
There's the rub. The individuals who control the largest amount of property are without exception corporations. Corporations, in the American legal reality, act in a limited sense as individuals. But unlike you or I, whose opinions are not mandated by law (but instead are codified into law), corporations are individuals who must value certain things in order to exist. Public companies must "maximize shareholder value" over all other things, or risk being destroyed by lawsuits. Like humans are biological organisms that must obtain food, water, and air to survive, corporations are social organisms that must obtain money to survive. Corporations live in a completely social reality -- a meta-world which we constructed for them to inhabit. But by making our belief in the right for humans to live subordinate to our belief in the right for humans to own property, we have made our ability to control the existence of corporations weaker than their ability to control us.
Belief in capitalism makes it a fact. Similarly, belief in the right of people to live would also make that a fact. American society privileges the former above the latter. Neither is more "real" than the other, indeed both are completely created and supported by the belief of people. But it will always be in capital's best interest to privilege property rights over any other socially constructed right, and if possible, to elevate that right to the status of "Natural Law" in order to maintain it as firmly as possible. The only way this can be reversed, the only way that people can reassert their control over the reality in which we exist, is by people speaking directly to each other, without capital mediating their voices.
Right now, the "voice of the people" is assumed to be the news media. American media is corporate -- that is, all major organs of media are corporations, without exception. Corporations, as seen above, will always privilege capital over all else, since it is the only way they can continue to exist. Therefore, media is in fact not the voice of the people at all, but the voice of corporate reality. Corporate media speaks to you, not for you, and cannot be trusted to reflect the views of humans. Instead, it is the organ with which corporations will continue to recreate the reality that allows them to exist at our expense.
This, finally, is why community matters. The only potential way out of this mousetrap we've created for ourselves is to actually speak directly to each other. Town meetings, open hearings, internet communities, places where people may actually speak as human individuals to other human individuals; these are the only places that we may examine what we have decided will be our reality, and the only places we may possibly decide to change that reality.
To take one example which is already happening: Peer-to-peer file sharing. The essence of P2P is the fact that large numbers of individuals have decided that their reality does not recognize the so-called "right" for corporations to own the files on their computer. Swapping MP3s, in their view, is not "stealing" because those who share their files don't consider themselves to be gaining or losing property. That is, they are challenging the assumption that music is an object that can be owned, by an artist, a record company, or indeed anyone. The socially constructed nature of this phenomenon is very evident in this case, as the record companies struggle to define file sharing as "piracy," while file-sharers counter that it is "fair use." Both of these terms are social constructs -- one defines the act as "wrong," the other as "acceptable." The battle is over whose reality will ultimately be stronger and become true.
What's striking about this struggle is that it is one of the few open battles directly waged by people against corporations. Few voices in corporate media have come out in defense of file-sharing, while the unfiltered voices of individuals have loudly and repeatedly, if not often eloquently, defended it. This is possibly the first time the internet has served as a means for individuals to attempt to change a basic social reality which was previously held to be unquestionably true.
What other "truths" do we hold to be self-evident? Which of them do we privilege over the lives of other humans, over even our own lives? Which of your opinions determines the reality in which you live, and from where did you derive that opinion? Are we, as a species, satisfied with the reality we've constructed for ourselves? It is only by asking and truthfully answering these questions, like Jefferson did, that we can begin to reassert control over the basic facts of our existence. Community matters because communities are people, and people create reality. What world do you want to create?
Almost every week I tell my friends and loved ones "There's an article on Slashdot that points to this great page, but you can't see it, because it's Slashdotted". They don't care anymore.
It's true, not everyone needs math. In fact, if most people don't learn math, then folks like me get paid more for our math knowledge.
I used math over the last seven days to:
Guestimate how long it will take me to do a task, based on past performance and how much was budgeted.
Made an estimate of what sprinkler I needed for my lawn and type of grass, taking into account water coverage and projected rainfall.
Determined what operations to make to get a bit structure in the format I desired, over a system with endian differences (using Fortran - yuck!)
For fun, calculated how many managers it would take to run a company, based on each manager having a maximum of 4 people under them (still working on those formulas - I leave it as an excerise for the reader to determine why I decided on 4, or you could go join the Discordians and find out for yourself).
Calculated my wife's reading rate, to determine when she would be done with the Harry Potter book
Cut down a recipe for 10 to a recipe for 2 1/2.
Determined whether it would be a better idea to make an extra car payment, house payment, get a CD, or invest in a mutual fund
Tried to figure out your age, based on how little math you have had (19? 20?)
It's been a slow math week, too. In my job (systems programmer), I've used logic, binary arithmetic, calculus, trig, geometry, statistics, and other flavors of math.
Understanding the materials is a long way from realizing practical applications. Even these folks who do math for a living don't comprehend possible applications yet, but it's been a safe bet that today's math theory is tommorrow's application.
Must be your settings. I see the year in all the dates on/. Go to your user page and change the date display format.
Sir, you are correct. The setting is under "Customize Homepage", and after hitting the save button, all dates were in the new format.
You can't change previous posts, but I'd like to change it to (I'm getting annoyed at only using the month and the day as a date stamp on Slashdot posts - how short sighted of me not to investigate all the customization options, before criticizing the editors. You can really make a fool out of yourself if you don't try hard enough.)
I only wish someone would have pointed this out yesterday, so more Slashdotters could have seen it...
Furthermore, I think young people need to get together when they have the advantage (when still in HS) with their intellectual property, and form a corporation with a collective structure of the inventors making decisions, so they can leverage a bit more decisionmaking power with their IP.
This is true - your best ideas will probably come while you are young and in school, and working for a corporation will narrow your explorations, and probably steal your best ideas. If you want to make the big dough, and don't mind taking the big risk, start your own company.
Having said that, I still believe post-college is the way to go. If you fail, or the industry collaspes, you will have a degree to fall back on. If you suceed, you will have at least sat through the mandatory lectures, so that you won't get lectured on Slashdot on proper list creation, database design, or basic security.
Roblimo wrote an article earlier today that showed some real business knowledge in the minds behind Slashdot. They've been at this game for a while, and now do what they love for a living. It would be nice to have a series of articles, something like "Business for Nerds, Stuff that Doesn't Seem to Matter But Actually Does", and make it a linked column, rather than a Slashdot post, so that it doesn't get lost in the archives. Something like the FAQ, but updated, and with years (I'm getting annoyed at only using the month and the day as a date stamp on Slashdot posts - how short sighted).
Most of us assume the editors sit in a room all day, reading submissions, giving them scores based on Linux relevance (+1), Microsoft bashing (+1), or the geek factor (+2), and post the highest scores. Jon Katz is typing on that laptop in the corner, but for the most part, it's become a brain dead operation: let the stories come to you, and think of something clever to say after the poster's words.
I'm glad to see that there is some thought and reflection going on, and that you are capable of writing an opinion peice that would blow away any of the other comentary sites (ZDNet should repost it as a guest column, and Salon could Salonify it easily).
As for your opinions, I agree, the present is somewhat depressing but the future is bright for business. You've managed to completely change my opinion on leasing software. Now, if only I could get the IRS to believe my Microsoft purchases were unreimbursed business expenses...
Microsoft has about a 50% sucess rate selling services/tech to the home community. MSN isn't unseating AOL anytime soon, MSIE is the top browser, Media Player is having a hard time delivering DIVX:) codecs to the masses, etc., etc. I doubt subscriptions will catch on at home, and may drive home users to try Linux, but Microsoft knows this, and will probably sell a tradition package at home (bundled invisibly with the cost of the machine), or push for businesses to purchase liscenses that can be used at home (a great idea for any company that wants computer literate employees, able to do work at home).
What would still be nice is some kind of system that lets the little guys survive. Something Awful and other efront pages are now without a home, and even StileProject is having ISP problems. It seems easier for content providers to go the traditional media route - if a new comic wants to make it in the papers, it can survive the growing years based on money generated by Peanuts and Dilbert. In the online world, comic creators can start small, then run out of money just as the reach the popular point. Even Penny Arcade is asking for donations.
I'd like to see someone come up with a subscription-type system that works. I'm thinking of a newspaper-type model, where my subscription gets me my news, comics, and some items of tech interest, while part of my money supports items I don't care about, like sports and Lifestyles. I don't mind paying $X a month, an even getting some adds, if it will guarentee Rich Kyanka gets a hot meal every month.
Well, I'm rambling into off-topic land, so back to work...
Re:Interesting Lecture.
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If you want to go after large-scale pirates, you use law enforcement, warrants, or, in some cases, diplomacy and trade threats. This is something law enforcement can do - work with a focus on a single target, and allocate resources comparable to the task at hand.
Mass consumer piracy is harder. If everyone is doing it, then you have a problem enforcing the law. There are few squealers, and it fails a cost / benefit test. The best way to prevent it is to make it technologically difficult to pirate media, and ocassionaly beat the bush to get the pirates, spending all the enforcement time, money and energy at once. It is possible to pirate cable TV, but you need the equipment, and every three years or so they run around looking for cable lines that shouldn't be there.
So, yeah, this is aimed at Average Jones, not the mass-market pirates. The alternative may be no digital content. Back to the VHS (macrovision) and audio cassettes!
BTW, the guy was arguing that perfect copying was possible, and that this was a benefit. The difference is the decryption, which is difficult and propriatary, and the licsense, which means the reader and the media itself have to shake hands and decide the user is permitted to play the data. What happens when companies close, or media goes out of style? For a preview of what's to come, ask someone who bought a DIVX player what they did with all their movies.
Re:Interesting Lecture.
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CPRM Lecture
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I saw that tree structure toward the end of the lecture (45 minutes in?) It looked like it was a recent development (last 4 years), and I wasn't sure whether they were contemplating it or implementing it.
The idea is that there is a tree of all possible keys, and each manufacturer is assigned a branch. If the manufacturer is a rogue manufacturer (gets a large number of keys to use, then violates the licsense by distributing them publicly), then you can just specify a root node as being invalidated, and all the rogue keys are invalidated.
It sounded to me, however, that a node was a set of sixteen keys. The tree structure simply makes it possible to test if a node was a child node of a rogue parent, and thus invalidate ALL the keys. This was to mitigate the rogue manufacturer strategy, not the clever hacker attack. BTW, it would also help if a clueless manufacturer leaves his keys in a easily retrievable form - the bad manufacturer's keys can all be invalidated.
It also seems that the clever hacker gets the best of all possible worlds. If he can get the keys for a device, and can fool the software into running for him, he can play anything he likes, without consequence - none of the information is sent back to a central server. When he shares this info, and it becomes popular, his hard-won keys are invalidated, and he has to start over. Unless he is motivated, he will eventually quit sharing, and keep his keys to himself. If he distributes a method to get keys, based on one manufacturer, all that manufacturer's keys might be revoked. If it breaks the encryption (a posibility they won't even consider), then all keys are open, and all bets are off.
There is a bit of confusion about what this technology really is, which is increased by the fact that the impementers don't want to give out the details. It would be nice if someone put together a web page of what we know about this technology, so we can come to some concensus on it.
It would also be nice to have the "rogue hacker in Norway" chart, outlining when he was mentioned, and his movements about Europe. Different people refered to him being from Norway, Sweeden, and I even heard a Germany. That hacker's on the run!!!
Re:Closed minds (Troll)
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Umm... Troll?
He's barely on topic, and the whole thing could be pasted onto any copyright discussion.
But, since no one else is discussing the story, free mod points!
Of course, there often appears to be no difference between the clever paste-from-file troll and the poster who hasn't figured out the culture yet (post on topic, few if any offtopic "additional stabs"). Letting this rambling stuff get modded up just encourages this kind of behaviour.
Since I'm breaking my own rules, should I post or not?... sure, it's a slow day.
If it isn't a troll, then - The topic was not intellectual property or software copyrights. The topic, if you cared, was about a contraversial new technology that promises to allow media copyright holders (recording companies, movie studios, cable broadcasters, etc) to enforce, in hardware, their copyright restrictions. On one hand, this seems preferable to enforcing the restrictions in law, since that would involve violating privacy and getting the government more into people's lives. The bad part is it gives the consumer no advantage, except perhaps the studios would release more copyrighted materials if they thought they would be safe.
To argue that this is a good thing, is to say that copyrights promote artistic progress, since innovators and creators and facilitators can be sure that they will earn a living off what they created. John Carmak et all made Quake 3 only because enough John's and Debbie's would buy it to make it worth their time. To argue that John Carmak should freely share what he created is like saying "Johnny, you get 2 dollars allowance, but Debbie didn't do her chores, so she gets none. But to be fair, give her one of your dollars."
Sharing and open-source work well for those who want to share, and who have independant means to support themselves. Those who live off their work deserve to be compensated for it. Forget about nursery school and childhood, this is the adult world. If you have a talent, and you make your living off of that talent, then if people steal your creation, then they are attacking your ability to survive, and discouraging other talented folks. If record companies, Napster users, movie studios, and Gnutella users could find a way to fairly compensate those people who worked to create the art, then the world would be a little better. If Linus couldn't afford to pay the electric bill, then Linux wouldn't be in such great shape today.
I'm watching the lecture now, and I'm impressed by the quality of the video. Some text is illegible, but I'm sure the PowerPoint presentation would be availible elsewhere. There are multiple cameras, cuts to the audience, etc. Stanford has a pretty professional system.
The speaker is fairly vague about the whole thing, or perhaps I'm not familiar with the tech. The idea seems to be that each device gets 16 (out of 2^64?) keys, that will allow the device to decode a file in their propriatary and patented C2 algorithm. Devices may, by chance, share one or more keys, but not all 16. In addition, keys appear to be serially numbered, so that decryption uses Key 7892's data, as well as the fact that it is key #7892.
If key X is compromised, and the powers-that-be discover it on Day 0, then on Day 1 all new media would return garbage when key X was used. The distributer of the key wouldn't be affected - he has 15 keys left. Other users shouldn't be affected - most still have 16, some have 15 left. Users of the illegal key would be unable to see new media, but Day -1 media and earlier would still be accessible.
In any case, new media has a serial number, and some standard fields (some in write-only space) that encode the permissions on the media - if copies are permitted, if instead copies are "check out", deleting the original. Complying devices, the only ones with keys, obey these fields because they agreed to when they liscensed the technology. The speaker claims that there is no restriction on copying data, but you either have to know the decryption algortihm (very hard) or have a keyed device to decode the file.
Under the scheme, you could have a peice of media with serial #4, with encrypted data and instructions that the data can only be played if it resides on media with serial #4. Since you need industrial equipment to write a serial number, you can make a perfect copy of the Matrix DVD (onto media with a different factory-endoded serial number), and a compliant player would refuse to play it. If my Matrix DVD was re-writable, I could image the DVD to my hard disk, for back-up purposes, tape South Park on the DVD, then when I wanted to watch the Matrix again, copy it back to the original DVD, and only then it would play. If the original was physically destroyed, I'm out of luck. Backups, in the traditional sense, would not be allowed. He aluded that all complying media would have some writable areas, to allow the accounting needed to make backups, etc.
So it's a combo of technology, licsensing, and patents. Great.
The submitter's webpage argues that software players would break the system. It might be hard to retreive a key from hardware, but not as hard from software. He argues that Window's Media Player would have 16 keys for all copies, all these could be found, and soon WMP would no longer work. Microsoft would have to issue a new WMP, and the cycle would continue.
I disagree. Either the protection would be a the disk drive level, WMP would have different keys for every copy, or hard-drive based software would be outside of the realm of CPRM. If the protection is at the disk drive level, WMP would rely on the hard drive to provide keys and decoding, and by distributing keys you would only be limiting your own ability to play new media. If each copy of WMP has its own keys, then again, you aren't damaging Microsoft, but you may be linking yourself to the crime. If you compromise two keys, then Microsoft may me able to link you to breaking the keys.
However, I doubt that this tech will be used on hard drives. They would have to standardize the encryption, which they don't want to do. More likely is that CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives will be unable to play CPRM CDs at all. We'll complain, the content providers will say tough shit, buy a new CD player. Since all previous technology would become obselete, I doubt this will catch on like wildfire.
When I was a kid, we didn't have cable at home. Half the fun of family vacations was watching cable TV - MTV, TNT, a movie playing all the time. We'd travel hundreds of miles, then me and my siblings would want to stay in the hotel room and watch TV.
Now, when I go to Disney World with my kids ten years from now, they won't want to leave the hotel room. "But Dad, I have a latency of 0! ZERO!!!! I'm fragging all my friends back home! Who wants to ride stupid roller coasters, anyway."
This looks like the first solution that will work for me. 10 GB just isn't as large as it used to be - I really don't have space to partition out new drives without starting from scratch.
It will have to wait a while - I want to back some stuff up with my new CD-writer, and my job is taking more of my day. Still, you've given me some hope. If only I'd taken notes the first time around, so I'd know what configuration changes I had made to the default Red Hat system...
Again, thanks for responding to a question that probably should have been asked on a newsgroup.
Re:What's it good for if your friends don't have o
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I believe that this quote:
not to play Quake
Taken in conjunction with
this comment entitles you to some elective surgery.
Funny. Someone else beat me to the first Quake post, but I may be the first non-anonymous guy. And I lost one just last week for an AYBABTU reference...
Now, where's the AYCABTU reference?
Re:What's it good for if your friends don't have o
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This must be a troll....
A good one, though - only a couple of red flags - he could have left out the Microsoft stuff and still got me.
It might even be the dreaded double-irony troll - what is the point of a bunch of Slashdotters commenting on developments in Cray super-computers? Inside knowledge? "Maybe it will run Linux?" "They ran Win2000, and now it is as fast as a 386! LOL!"
As I said, truly an effective troll - no one has much to comment on, but he throws in a catalyst to make people comment, anyway.
Re:What's it good for if your friends don't have o
on
Update From Cray World
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· Score: 2
We should rethink how we're choosing supercomputers, imho.
We? What are you talking about? Who here has even had any input into the purchasing of a super-computer? If it wasn't for your relatively tame posting history, I'd say you were a troll...
People buy a super-computer for one purpose - raw computing power. Not optimized for interconnectivity, not to conform to standards, not to run Linux or other system of choice, not to play Quake (although I'd like to see the benchmarks).
You buy it not because it's a good deal, but because you have research bucks to burn, and want the best money can buy. If you are even asking about cost or a down-the-road upgrade to a different platform, you are probably not looking for a super-computer.
It's like saying, maybe the Air Force should give up on specially designed fighter planes, and see if it would be a better idea to convert 747s or an Airbus model. Imagine the cost savings in spare parts!
I don't know of any social organization where this kind of thing doesn't happen. The different person is always subject to extra attention, and, if it is allowed, ridicule. In the workplace, there are laws and policies against harassment, but the reason for those laws and policies is because it is prevalent.
One thing to remember is that these are children. They are acting out in natural ways. The reason the Internet and the media are blamed for problems in school is we want to blame someone, to say that bad behavior was learned from somewhere else. The fact seems to be that bullying, singling out different children, and forming cliques is natural behavior. It also seems natural to react with depression, becoming withdrawn, or making a decision to conform.
Why is it this way? Maybe there is a pressure to eliminate those with some sort of flaw. These "flawed" organisms compete for food and resources with the "unflawed" folks, so there may be a group pressure to isolate the strange elements and deny them social privileges. Perhaps even suicide is a natural reaction to this treatment by the group.
Even though we are influenced by biology, we are not determined by it. I think we need to recognize a real biological influence behind this cycle, and come up with rational and societal methods for combating it.
One of the problems is that this anti-biological tactic used to be in the realm of religion. In Christianity, the call was to "love one another, as God has loved you". The fact that many Christians did not practice this decree is a human flaw, not a flaw in the religion. Regardless, now that religion has taken a back seat in public life, we need some sort of shared civil code to replace it.
I don't want to go back to the days of religious intolerance, but we do need something that looks like religion, to help us care for each other a little better, something that we can share as Americans or Humans, regardless of race, creed, or religion
As for those who are currently going through this hell, they need to remember that this time in their life is temporary. There are those that appreciate them for who they are, and when they get out of school, they can move to a place where they are accepted. Suicide is permanent, and you can't take back murder, but, if you survive school, you'll be a better person for it.
I've heard great things about Debian, and a non-violent change of power makes it look pretty stable on the administrative end.
So, if I want to try it out, how do I convert my Red Hat box to Debian? Kill everything and start over? Change some core files? Or is it unadvisable?
It is often said that the many Linux distributions is a strength. I'll believe it if it is possible to move between systems. Any ideas?
BTW, background info, I'm running Red Hat on a laptop, dual-booting with Win98. Newer hardware requires the latest kernel as well as at least XFree 4.0.
There is a published standard for audio CDs. It's called the redbook standard.
This CD does not meet the standard.
I'm not too sure about this statement. Read the second page of the Salon article.
It seems that there are two copy-protection scemes. One is to mess with the Table of Contents, so that CD-ROM burners get confused on track length, CD-time, etc, while simplistic CD readers ignore CD-ROM table of contents. The second way is to intentionally add small errors to the track. The CD reader skips over the errors, while the CD-ROM reader trys to re-read the area, attempting to solve the disparity between the data and the error-correcting data. Since the disparity is intentional, it never suceeds, and determines that the disk is corrupt.
It seems it is taking advantages of ambiguities in the Red Book standard, to confuse CD-ROM readers expecting the CD-ROM (Yellow Book)standard. This means that reader based on the Yellow Book standard (some with skip-protection, all laptop and desktop readers, etc) will be unable to read the CDs, while straight Red Rook readers will be able to read them.
The solution, it seems, is to have a CD-ROM driver that ignores error-correction, emulating a "dumb" CD reader.
This is how Microsoft will get complete control of the home computer arena. They don't tell you to bend all the way over all at once. First, you lean a little, then a little more. Pretty soon you are completely bent over and you don't even know it.
Don't forget:
Step 5 - Interactive Wallpaper. Sold by the square yard, the resolution is just good enough that you have to get close to see the pixelization. You run Active Wallpaper for a month, watching the 3-D clock bounce around, then convert to a simple tiled pattern for half a year, then a solid color again after a year - but hey, no repainting, ever!!! It even house-trains the puppy with little electro-shocks when it does wrong!
Of course, it's a real power hog. It now makes sense why Microsoft bought up all those generating plants on the west coast in 2003. Real hackers leave it black all the time or display tty1, and Wil Wright is a billionare, now that people use the Sims 4 to pick wallpaper patterns.
There's some good obvious picks on the list, but leaving out Steve Russell (Computer Space), Nolan Bushnell (No Introduction Needed?) and David Braben (Elite) are all inexcusable omissions.
What about Shashi of Sind? It's inexcusable to miss one of the true Godfathers of gaming. I agree, the list is stuffed with people from this millineum at the expense of the true pioneers.
A bit of satire there - not everyone knows who the people are that you are mentioning, including myself. Could you give a short bio?
BTW, Shashi of Sind, according to a Indian legend, invented Chess. King Rai Bhalit in North West India wanted to reward him, and Shashi asked for one grain of wheat on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, etc. The king agreed. This is (2^65)-1, or 3.69x10^19 grains, much more than the total amount of grain availible.
This is probably the basis of the legend that Chess comes from India, but Sam Sloan thinks it came from China.
Slashdot Mirror
There has always been a money element to geekiness. Computers cost money, and, in computers, geek value often equals cost. MIT has a lot of geeks, but well funded geeks - have you seen the cost of undergraduate tuition? The space program, one of the geekiest endeavors ever, was only possible because the Russians were trying to do it, and was funded with billions of tax dollars.
We often act like we are entering some geek utopia, that our technology is freeing us from the constraints of the body and letting us live in the empire of the mind. Instead, it is simply a good economy, and the money from a middle-class lifestyle that fuels our current lifestyles. It's often about the gadgets, not the knowledge, and when it is about the knowledge, you often have to spend $200 at O'Reilly just to get the basic knowledge to understand the free guides.
For an interesting take on the subject, check out The Guy I Almost Was, a web comic at e-sheep. It takes some time and a little bandwidth, but is well-worth the read.
I found that you could hightlight a phrase, then alt-click on the highlighted phrase, to search on more than one word. It's a interesting idea, to feed words to a search engine from a webpage, but the auto-googler, mentioned elsewhere in the thread, is a better idea.
javascript:q=(document.getSelection)? document.getSelection(): document.selection.createRange(); if(!q)q=prompt('Search:',''); if(q)location= 'http://www.google.com/search?q='+escape(q);
That is the coolest trick I've seen in a long time.
To do it in MSIE 5.5 (which may work in other browsers) I made a bookmark to a random page, and put it in the "Links" folder (which is, for me, the folder that contains bookmarks displayed in the Links toolbar). This caused the link to appear in the toolbar. I then right-clicked, selected Properties, and pasted the code into the URL box. It warned me a few times that "javascript" was not a registered program, then let me click OK. Presto, I can highlight a word, click the "AutoGoogle" Link, and I get a Google search, and I can click Back for the previous page!
I only wish you had posted sooner in the thread, so you could have gotten some mod points and more visibility. Maybe you'll get refered in a Slashback.
In my post, for instance, it underlines "Java", "QuickClick", "NBCi", and "Scientology". Clicking on an underlined word brings up a menu with a few links. For instance, "QuickClick"'s menu allows you to download it or go to the homepage. "Java" has links to the programming language, and "NBCi" has a menu two levels thick of news, stock info, analysis, etc.
For Scientology, it has two links, both to the Scientology magazine, Freedom.
Looks like the Church beat me to the idea.
You may have seen it. The NBCi spokeswoman walks dramatically on stage. Hundreds are in attendance, all with their own muted terminals. The screen behind her shows a HUGE display. She introduces the concept ("See a word, click it, and get information"), the people are estatic.
Every detail is perfect and hilarious.
The spokeswoman is the anti-geek - attractive, female, thinks Java is a drink, lips as red as Valentine's Day. All marketing, doesn't understand a line of code of the QuickClick tech.
She has to have an exagerated gesture for everything. The motion for "clicking" is not pointing (that was used for "seeing"), but instead Jazz Hands, or the motion of throwing away a basketball.
The people at their terminals are blasted by light as their screens turn into spotlights, or perhaps microwaves digesting metal.
One poor guy is so excited, you can see him squirming, barely unable to take his eyes off his personal terminal to ask "Any word?" He climaxes the answer, "Yes, Any Word!"
They thunder into spontaneous applause. One guy lifts his arms and face to the ceiling, as if to say "Thank You, God!" or perhaps "All Praise to the CEO of NBCi.com!"
Unfortunately, NBCi is a little late for the dot-com buzz. Still, I giggle a little everytime I see this commerical, and the thousands of cultists who dressed in their best outfits for the unveiling of the new tech.
With Scientology in the air, it even gets more interesting - old LRH's learning tech hinges on the idea that all misunderstandings are over misunderstood words. When you don't get a new subject, it is solely because you didn't understand a word (not because the material is hard, or doesn't make sense, or the teacher is awful). You are encouraged to look up all the words you didn't understand, and then you will understand.
The Church could directly license this "tech" for their own use. "Free will? What's that?" Click. "Being Clear enough to follow the teaching of LRH! I get it!" Further, the introduction of the "SciClick" tech would look a lot like the NBCi commerical, except that the spokeswoman would be replaced by David Miscavige in a sailor's outfit, with or without the lipstick.
By rusty
Mon Apr 9th, 2001 at 06:46:50 AM EST
Human reality is socially constructed. That is, most of the "facts" that determine our daily lives are socially constructed facts, which are true as long as enough people believe them to be true. The right to own property, the right to not be murdered, indeed the right to continue to live at all; all of these are socially constructed rights, which are true only as long as enough of us believe in them.
American society has created for itself a Mobius-like reality by privileging capital, or property rights, above all else. This has granted corporations the power to purchase the reality that best suits them, and corporations in turn recreate the reality that privileges money. Communities -- places, real or virtual, where people speak directly to each other, without corporate mediation -- are the only hope we have to reassert control over our own reality, and place it back in the hands of people, instead of the fictional entities we call corporations.
The United States Declaration of Independence reads, in part, as follows:
While Jefferson ultimately attributes the source of humanity's "inalienable rights" to the "Creator," he recognizes that the only way for humanity to maintain these rights is by self-governance. That is, whether you are granted rights by God or not is essentially irrelevant, since the actual exercise of those rights is a social phenomenon."Human rights" are fundamentally a social construct. Your individual right to continue to live is maintained only as long as there is not a more powerful individual or group who wishes to cause your death. Humans have no natural predators -- that is, no species other than humanity itself supports its existence by killing humans.
This puts us in the unusual position of being able to determine a large proportion of "reality" as we experience it. Obviously, if I jump off a tall building, I will likely be killed on impact with the ground, no matter how many people believe I won't be. Reality, and existence, for me, is over. But what this event means to the people who didn't actually jump off the building with me has yet to be constructed. What the majority of others think about this event will determine the socially constructed reality of the event. That is, "what actually happened" is determined by common agreement.
If enough people believe I was pushed off that building, the individual they believe pushed me will go to jail. Buried in that sentence are a whole host of other socially constructed "truths", among which are that pushing someone off a building is murder, that murder is wrong, and that society may physically and behaviorally confine those who commit murder. None of these things are fundamentally "true" to any greater extent than that they are made true by enough people believing in them.
Take a different example. I die of pancreatic cancer. As with the first example, it makes no difference to me whatsoever what caused this event, since I am dead. But again, the larger meaning of this event, the "what actually happened" has yet to be determined, and in this case, it may become a lot more complex. You see, before I died of pancreatic cancer, I was a small farmer in Colorado. To save costs, I accepted cakes of processed sewage sludge from New York City, which I used to fertilize my tree farm. This was legal, because American society, acting through the EPA, has determined that "sludge farming" is an acceptable way to dispose of combined human and industrial wastes, despite the fact that these sludge cakes contain extremely high concentrations of heavy metals, petroleum byproducts, and carcinogenic chemicals.
An autopsy determines that my pancreatic cancer was the result of high concentrations of nickel and lead in my body. The concentrations of nickel and lead in the soil of my farm are hundreds of times the base levels in other soil in the area. It takes little imagination to conclude that my death was a result of the toxic sludge that I've been using to fertilize my farm.
The physical facts of my death are now known. But the social reality of the event still has not been determined. Seeing a potential disaster in the works, SludgeCo, who were my source of toxic farm sludge, will inevitably swing the PR machine into action. Company spokes-people will insist that I chose, of my own free will, to use their safe, inexpensive fertilizer. They will point to other possible explanations of my cancer, and produce "independent" company-paid scientists to cast doubt on the link between heavy metals and cancer. "Grassroots" organizations of farmers, funded by the company, will protest that limiting the flow of cheap SludgeCo fertilizer will harm their ability to compete in the market, and damage the competitiveness of Colorado's agriculture industry.
The point of all this public relations work is to create a socially accepted "reality" which does not make SludgeCo a murderer. This process is the bedrock on which American society creates its reality. Laws are made by representatives. Representatives act based upon what they believe are the opinions of their constituents. Constituents base their beliefs on information provided to them by media, such as television, radio, and newspapers. And at every level of this process, the public relations industry intervenes to create the "reality" that best suits their client.
American society is essentially capitalist. Capital is another one of those social fictions which has effaced its own socially-constructed nature to the point that most people accept it as "real," in and of itself, and beyond their ability to control. Like murder, though, money has no reality beyond that which we collectively grant it. In American capitalism, money is exchangeable for property, and vice versa. The reality of money is founded in our belief that the ownership of property is a fundamental right. Communist revolutions all over the world have proven that individual ownership of property is not a fact of nature, but is a socially constructed reality that holds true only as long as a sufficient number of people believe in it. If a sufficient number of people believe that they own the property you previously considered "yours," then that becomes true.
The base belief in individual ownership of property means that in order to continue to live, each of us must obtain money to purchase the basic things that enable that. That is, I have to get food, and in order to get food away from those who "own" it, I have to give them money. So life, in a capitalist society, is subordinate to property. My life, and yours, is sustained only at the pleasure of a social fiction. Because of our assent to this form of reality, those who hold the most property may dictate the views of the largest number of people, which in turn recreates and reinforces the reality which enables those property-holders to continue to hold property.
There's the rub. The individuals who control the largest amount of property are without exception corporations. Corporations, in the American legal reality, act in a limited sense as individuals. But unlike you or I, whose opinions are not mandated by law (but instead are codified into law), corporations are individuals who must value certain things in order to exist. Public companies must "maximize shareholder value" over all other things, or risk being destroyed by lawsuits. Like humans are biological organisms that must obtain food, water, and air to survive, corporations are social organisms that must obtain money to survive. Corporations live in a completely social reality -- a meta-world which we constructed for them to inhabit. But by making our belief in the right for humans to live subordinate to our belief in the right for humans to own property, we have made our ability to control the existence of corporations weaker than their ability to control us.
Belief in capitalism makes it a fact. Similarly, belief in the right of people to live would also make that a fact. American society privileges the former above the latter. Neither is more "real" than the other, indeed both are completely created and supported by the belief of people. But it will always be in capital's best interest to privilege property rights over any other socially constructed right, and if possible, to elevate that right to the status of "Natural Law" in order to maintain it as firmly as possible. The only way this can be reversed, the only way that people can reassert their control over the reality in which we exist, is by people speaking directly to each other, without capital mediating their voices.
Right now, the "voice of the people" is assumed to be the news media. American media is corporate -- that is, all major organs of media are corporations, without exception. Corporations, as seen above, will always privilege capital over all else, since it is the only way they can continue to exist. Therefore, media is in fact not the voice of the people at all, but the voice of corporate reality. Corporate media speaks to you, not for you, and cannot be trusted to reflect the views of humans. Instead, it is the organ with which corporations will continue to recreate the reality that allows them to exist at our expense.
This, finally, is why community matters. The only potential way out of this mousetrap we've created for ourselves is to actually speak directly to each other. Town meetings, open hearings, internet communities, places where people may actually speak as human individuals to other human individuals; these are the only places that we may examine what we have decided will be our reality, and the only places we may possibly decide to change that reality.
To take one example which is already happening: Peer-to-peer file sharing. The essence of P2P is the fact that large numbers of individuals have decided that their reality does not recognize the so-called "right" for corporations to own the files on their computer. Swapping MP3s, in their view, is not "stealing" because those who share their files don't consider themselves to be gaining or losing property. That is, they are challenging the assumption that music is an object that can be owned, by an artist, a record company, or indeed anyone. The socially constructed nature of this phenomenon is very evident in this case, as the record companies struggle to define file sharing as "piracy," while file-sharers counter that it is "fair use." Both of these terms are social constructs -- one defines the act as "wrong," the other as "acceptable." The battle is over whose reality will ultimately be stronger and become true.
What's striking about this struggle is that it is one of the few open battles directly waged by people against corporations. Few voices in corporate media have come out in defense of file-sharing, while the unfiltered voices of individuals have loudly and repeatedly, if not often eloquently, defended it. This is possibly the first time the internet has served as a means for individuals to attempt to change a basic social reality which was previously held to be unquestionably true.
What other "truths" do we hold to be self-evident? Which of them do we privilege over the lives of other humans, over even our own lives? Which of your opinions determines the reality in which you live, and from where did you derive that opinion? Are we, as a species, satisfied with the reality we've constructed for ourselves? It is only by asking and truthfully answering these questions, like Jefferson did, that we can begin to reassert control over the basic facts of our existence. Community matters because communities are people, and people create reality. What world do you want to create?
Almost every week I tell my friends and loved ones "There's an article on Slashdot that points to this great page, but you can't see it, because it's Slashdotted". They don't care anymore.
I used math over the last seven days to:
Guestimate how long it will take me to do a task, based on past performance and how much was budgeted.
Made an estimate of what sprinkler I needed for my lawn and type of grass, taking into account water coverage and projected rainfall.
Determined what operations to make to get a bit structure in the format I desired, over a system with endian differences (using Fortran - yuck!)
For fun, calculated how many managers it would take to run a company, based on each manager having a maximum of 4 people under them (still working on those formulas - I leave it as an excerise for the reader to determine why I decided on 4, or you could go join the Discordians and find out for yourself).
Calculated my wife's reading rate, to determine when she would be done with the Harry Potter book
Cut down a recipe for 10 to a recipe for 2 1/2.
Determined whether it would be a better idea to make an extra car payment, house payment, get a CD, or invest in a mutual fund
Tried to figure out your age, based on how little math you have had (19? 20?)
It's been a slow math week, too. In my job (systems programmer), I've used logic, binary arithmetic, calculus, trig, geometry, statistics, and other flavors of math.
Understanding the materials is a long way from realizing practical applications. Even these folks who do math for a living don't comprehend possible applications yet, but it's been a safe bet that today's math theory is tommorrow's application.
Sir, you are correct. The setting is under "Customize Homepage", and after hitting the save button, all dates were in the new format.
You can't change previous posts, but I'd like to change it to (I'm getting annoyed at only using the month and the day as a date stamp on Slashdot posts - how short sighted of me not to investigate all the customization options, before criticizing the editors. You can really make a fool out of yourself if you don't try hard enough.)
I only wish someone would have pointed this out yesterday, so more Slashdotters could have seen it...
This is true - your best ideas will probably come while you are young and in school, and working for a corporation will narrow your explorations, and probably steal your best ideas. If you want to make the big dough, and don't mind taking the big risk, start your own company.
Having said that, I still believe post-college is the way to go. If you fail, or the industry collaspes, you will have a degree to fall back on. If you suceed, you will have at least sat through the mandatory lectures, so that you won't get lectured on Slashdot on proper list creation, database design, or basic security.
Roblimo wrote an article earlier today that showed some real business knowledge in the minds behind Slashdot. They've been at this game for a while, and now do what they love for a living. It would be nice to have a series of articles, something like "Business for Nerds, Stuff that Doesn't Seem to Matter But Actually Does", and make it a linked column, rather than a Slashdot post, so that it doesn't get lost in the archives. Something like the FAQ, but updated, and with years (I'm getting annoyed at only using the month and the day as a date stamp on Slashdot posts - how short sighted).
I'm glad to see that there is some thought and reflection going on, and that you are capable of writing an opinion peice that would blow away any of the other comentary sites (ZDNet should repost it as a guest column, and Salon could Salonify it easily).
As for your opinions, I agree, the present is somewhat depressing but the future is bright for business. You've managed to completely change my opinion on leasing software. Now, if only I could get the IRS to believe my Microsoft purchases were unreimbursed business expenses...
Microsoft has about a 50% sucess rate selling services/tech to the home community. MSN isn't unseating AOL anytime soon, MSIE is the top browser, Media Player is having a hard time delivering DIVX:) codecs to the masses, etc., etc. I doubt subscriptions will catch on at home, and may drive home users to try Linux, but Microsoft knows this, and will probably sell a tradition package at home (bundled invisibly with the cost of the machine), or push for businesses to purchase liscenses that can be used at home (a great idea for any company that wants computer literate employees, able to do work at home).
What would still be nice is some kind of system that lets the little guys survive. Something Awful and other efront pages are now without a home, and even StileProject is having ISP problems. It seems easier for content providers to go the traditional media route - if a new comic wants to make it in the papers, it can survive the growing years based on money generated by Peanuts and Dilbert. In the online world, comic creators can start small, then run out of money just as the reach the popular point. Even Penny Arcade is asking for donations.
I'd like to see someone come up with a subscription-type system that works. I'm thinking of a newspaper-type model, where my subscription gets me my news, comics, and some items of tech interest, while part of my money supports items I don't care about, like sports and Lifestyles. I don't mind paying $X a month, an even getting some adds, if it will guarentee Rich Kyanka gets a hot meal every month.
Well, I'm rambling into off-topic land, so back to work...
Mass consumer piracy is harder. If everyone is doing it, then you have a problem enforcing the law. There are few squealers, and it fails a cost / benefit test. The best way to prevent it is to make it technologically difficult to pirate media, and ocassionaly beat the bush to get the pirates, spending all the enforcement time, money and energy at once. It is possible to pirate cable TV, but you need the equipment, and every three years or so they run around looking for cable lines that shouldn't be there.
So, yeah, this is aimed at Average Jones, not the mass-market pirates. The alternative may be no digital content. Back to the VHS (macrovision) and audio cassettes!
BTW, the guy was arguing that perfect copying was possible, and that this was a benefit. The difference is the decryption, which is difficult and propriatary, and the licsense, which means the reader and the media itself have to shake hands and decide the user is permitted to play the data. What happens when companies close, or media goes out of style? For a preview of what's to come, ask someone who bought a DIVX player what they did with all their movies.
The idea is that there is a tree of all possible keys, and each manufacturer is assigned a branch. If the manufacturer is a rogue manufacturer (gets a large number of keys to use, then violates the licsense by distributing them publicly), then you can just specify a root node as being invalidated, and all the rogue keys are invalidated.
It sounded to me, however, that a node was a set of sixteen keys. The tree structure simply makes it possible to test if a node was a child node of a rogue parent, and thus invalidate ALL the keys. This was to mitigate the rogue manufacturer strategy, not the clever hacker attack. BTW, it would also help if a clueless manufacturer leaves his keys in a easily retrievable form - the bad manufacturer's keys can all be invalidated.
It also seems that the clever hacker gets the best of all possible worlds. If he can get the keys for a device, and can fool the software into running for him, he can play anything he likes, without consequence - none of the information is sent back to a central server. When he shares this info, and it becomes popular, his hard-won keys are invalidated, and he has to start over. Unless he is motivated, he will eventually quit sharing, and keep his keys to himself. If he distributes a method to get keys, based on one manufacturer, all that manufacturer's keys might be revoked. If it breaks the encryption (a posibility they won't even consider), then all keys are open, and all bets are off.
There is a bit of confusion about what this technology really is, which is increased by the fact that the impementers don't want to give out the details. It would be nice if someone put together a web page of what we know about this technology, so we can come to some concensus on it.
It would also be nice to have the "rogue hacker in Norway" chart, outlining when he was mentioned, and his movements about Europe. Different people refered to him being from Norway, Sweeden, and I even heard a Germany. That hacker's on the run!!!
He's barely on topic, and the whole thing could be pasted onto any copyright discussion. But, since no one else is discussing the story, free mod points!
Of course, there often appears to be no difference between the clever paste-from-file troll and the poster who hasn't figured out the culture yet (post on topic, few if any offtopic "additional stabs"). Letting this rambling stuff get modded up just encourages this kind of behaviour.
Since I'm breaking my own rules, should I post or not?... sure, it's a slow day.
If it isn't a troll, then - The topic was not intellectual property or software copyrights. The topic, if you cared, was about a contraversial new technology that promises to allow media copyright holders (recording companies, movie studios, cable broadcasters, etc) to enforce, in hardware, their copyright restrictions. On one hand, this seems preferable to enforcing the restrictions in law, since that would involve violating privacy and getting the government more into people's lives. The bad part is it gives the consumer no advantage, except perhaps the studios would release more copyrighted materials if they thought they would be safe.
To argue that this is a good thing, is to say that copyrights promote artistic progress, since innovators and creators and facilitators can be sure that they will earn a living off what they created. John Carmak et all made Quake 3 only because enough John's and Debbie's would buy it to make it worth their time. To argue that John Carmak should freely share what he created is like saying "Johnny, you get 2 dollars allowance, but Debbie didn't do her chores, so she gets none. But to be fair, give her one of your dollars."
Sharing and open-source work well for those who want to share, and who have independant means to support themselves. Those who live off their work deserve to be compensated for it. Forget about nursery school and childhood, this is the adult world. If you have a talent, and you make your living off of that talent, then if people steal your creation, then they are attacking your ability to survive, and discouraging other talented folks. If record companies, Napster users, movie studios, and Gnutella users could find a way to fairly compensate those people who worked to create the art, then the world would be a little better. If Linus couldn't afford to pay the electric bill, then Linux wouldn't be in such great shape today.
The speaker is fairly vague about the whole thing, or perhaps I'm not familiar with the tech. The idea seems to be that each device gets 16 (out of 2^64?) keys, that will allow the device to decode a file in their propriatary and patented C2 algorithm. Devices may, by chance, share one or more keys, but not all 16. In addition, keys appear to be serially numbered, so that decryption uses Key 7892's data, as well as the fact that it is key #7892.
If key X is compromised, and the powers-that-be discover it on Day 0, then on Day 1 all new media would return garbage when key X was used. The distributer of the key wouldn't be affected - he has 15 keys left. Other users shouldn't be affected - most still have 16, some have 15 left. Users of the illegal key would be unable to see new media, but Day -1 media and earlier would still be accessible.
In any case, new media has a serial number, and some standard fields (some in write-only space) that encode the permissions on the media - if copies are permitted, if instead copies are "check out", deleting the original. Complying devices, the only ones with keys, obey these fields because they agreed to when they liscensed the technology. The speaker claims that there is no restriction on copying data, but you either have to know the decryption algortihm (very hard) or have a keyed device to decode the file.
Under the scheme, you could have a peice of media with serial #4, with encrypted data and instructions that the data can only be played if it resides on media with serial #4. Since you need industrial equipment to write a serial number, you can make a perfect copy of the Matrix DVD (onto media with a different factory-endoded serial number), and a compliant player would refuse to play it. If my Matrix DVD was re-writable, I could image the DVD to my hard disk, for back-up purposes, tape South Park on the DVD, then when I wanted to watch the Matrix again, copy it back to the original DVD, and only then it would play. If the original was physically destroyed, I'm out of luck. Backups, in the traditional sense, would not be allowed. He aluded that all complying media would have some writable areas, to allow the accounting needed to make backups, etc.
So it's a combo of technology, licsensing, and patents. Great.
The submitter's webpage argues that software players would break the system. It might be hard to retreive a key from hardware, but not as hard from software. He argues that Window's Media Player would have 16 keys for all copies, all these could be found, and soon WMP would no longer work. Microsoft would have to issue a new WMP, and the cycle would continue.
I disagree. Either the protection would be a the disk drive level, WMP would have different keys for every copy, or hard-drive based software would be outside of the realm of CPRM. If the protection is at the disk drive level, WMP would rely on the hard drive to provide keys and decoding, and by distributing keys you would only be limiting your own ability to play new media. If each copy of WMP has its own keys, then again, you aren't damaging Microsoft, but you may be linking yourself to the crime. If you compromise two keys, then Microsoft may me able to link you to breaking the keys.
However, I doubt that this tech will be used on hard drives. They would have to standardize the encryption, which they don't want to do. More likely is that CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives will be unable to play CPRM CDs at all. We'll complain, the content providers will say tough shit, buy a new CD player. Since all previous technology would become obselete, I doubt this will catch on like wildfire.
When I was a kid, we didn't have cable at home. Half the fun of family vacations was watching cable TV - MTV, TNT, a movie playing all the time. We'd travel hundreds of miles, then me and my siblings would want to stay in the hotel room and watch TV.
Now, when I go to Disney World with my kids ten years from now, they won't want to leave the hotel room. "But Dad, I have a latency of 0! ZERO!!!! I'm fragging all my friends back home! Who wants to ride stupid roller coasters, anyway."
It will have to wait a while - I want to back some stuff up with my new CD-writer, and my job is taking more of my day. Still, you've given me some hope. If only I'd taken notes the first time around, so I'd know what configuration changes I had made to the default Red Hat system...
Again, thanks for responding to a question that probably should have been asked on a newsgroup.
not to play Quake
Taken in conjunction with this comment entitles you to some elective surgery.
Funny. Someone else beat me to the first Quake post, but I may be the first non-anonymous guy. And I lost one just last week for an AYBABTU reference...
Now, where's the AYCABTU reference?
A good one, though - only a couple of red flags - he could have left out the Microsoft stuff and still got me.
It might even be the dreaded double-irony troll - what is the point of a bunch of Slashdotters commenting on developments in Cray super-computers? Inside knowledge? "Maybe it will run Linux?" "They ran Win2000, and now it is as fast as a 386! LOL!"
As I said, truly an effective troll - no one has much to comment on, but he throws in a catalyst to make people comment, anyway.
We? What are you talking about? Who here has even had any input into the purchasing of a super-computer? If it wasn't for your relatively tame posting history, I'd say you were a troll...
People buy a super-computer for one purpose - raw computing power. Not optimized for interconnectivity, not to conform to standards, not to run Linux or other system of choice, not to play Quake (although I'd like to see the benchmarks).
You buy it not because it's a good deal, but because you have research bucks to burn, and want the best money can buy. If you are even asking about cost or a down-the-road upgrade to a different platform, you are probably not looking for a super-computer.
It's like saying, maybe the Air Force should give up on specially designed fighter planes, and see if it would be a better idea to convert 747s or an Airbus model. Imagine the cost savings in spare parts!
One thing to remember is that these are children. They are acting out in natural ways. The reason the Internet and the media are blamed for problems in school is we want to blame someone, to say that bad behavior was learned from somewhere else. The fact seems to be that bullying, singling out different children, and forming cliques is natural behavior. It also seems natural to react with depression, becoming withdrawn, or making a decision to conform.
Why is it this way? Maybe there is a pressure to eliminate those with some sort of flaw. These "flawed" organisms compete for food and resources with the "unflawed" folks, so there may be a group pressure to isolate the strange elements and deny them social privileges. Perhaps even suicide is a natural reaction to this treatment by the group.
Even though we are influenced by biology, we are not determined by it. I think we need to recognize a real biological influence behind this cycle, and come up with rational and societal methods for combating it.
One of the problems is that this anti-biological tactic used to be in the realm of religion. In Christianity, the call was to "love one another, as God has loved you". The fact that many Christians did not practice this decree is a human flaw, not a flaw in the religion. Regardless, now that religion has taken a back seat in public life, we need some sort of shared civil code to replace it.
I don't want to go back to the days of religious intolerance, but we do need something that looks like religion, to help us care for each other a little better, something that we can share as Americans or Humans, regardless of race, creed, or religion
As for those who are currently going through this hell, they need to remember that this time in their life is temporary. There are those that appreciate them for who they are, and when they get out of school, they can move to a place where they are accepted. Suicide is permanent, and you can't take back murder, but, if you survive school, you'll be a better person for it.
So, if I want to try it out, how do I convert my Red Hat box to Debian? Kill everything and start over? Change some core files? Or is it unadvisable?
It is often said that the many Linux distributions is a strength. I'll believe it if it is possible to move between systems. Any ideas?
BTW, background info, I'm running Red Hat on a laptop, dual-booting with Win98. Newer hardware requires the latest kernel as well as at least XFree 4.0.
It seems that there are two copy-protection scemes. One is to mess with the Table of Contents, so that CD-ROM burners get confused on track length, CD-time, etc, while simplistic CD readers ignore CD-ROM table of contents. The second way is to intentionally add small errors to the track. The CD reader skips over the errors, while the CD-ROM reader trys to re-read the area, attempting to solve the disparity between the data and the error-correcting data. Since the disparity is intentional, it never suceeds, and determines that the disk is corrupt.
It seems it is taking advantages of ambiguities in the Red Book standard, to confuse CD-ROM readers expecting the CD-ROM (Yellow Book)standard. This means that reader based on the Yellow Book standard (some with skip-protection, all laptop and desktop readers, etc) will be unable to read the CDs, while straight Red Rook readers will be able to read them.
The solution, it seems, is to have a CD-ROM driver that ignores error-correction, emulating a "dumb" CD reader.
Don't forget:
Step 5 - Interactive Wallpaper. Sold by the square yard, the resolution is just good enough that you have to get close to see the pixelization. You run Active Wallpaper for a month, watching the 3-D clock bounce around, then convert to a simple tiled pattern for half a year, then a solid color again after a year - but hey, no repainting, ever!!! It even house-trains the puppy with little electro-shocks when it does wrong!
Of course, it's a real power hog. It now makes sense why Microsoft bought up all those generating plants on the west coast in 2003. Real hackers leave it black all the time or display tty1, and Wil Wright is a billionare, now that people use the Sims 4 to pick wallpaper patterns.
What about Shashi of Sind? It's inexcusable to miss one of the true Godfathers of gaming. I agree, the list is stuffed with people from this millineum at the expense of the true pioneers.
A bit of satire there - not everyone knows who the people are that you are mentioning, including myself. Could you give a short bio?
BTW, Shashi of Sind, according to a Indian legend, invented Chess. King Rai Bhalit in North West India wanted to reward him, and Shashi asked for one grain of wheat on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, etc. The king agreed. This is (2^65)-1, or 3.69x10^19 grains, much more than the total amount of grain availible.
This is probably the basis of the legend that Chess comes from India, but Sam Sloan thinks it came from China.