Come on - a woman as head of cybersecurity? This is like trolling the entire male IT world. If there's any single woman who's computer is going to be the focus of internet attacks - it's going to be hers.:-)
It's not that I have anything with women in positions of authority, but this is different - I think Obama is underestimating the collective power of the patriarchal IT industry.
Rule 34 if she looks anything like that actress named Anne.
This was going to be an angry post at the Crichtonite crap that you're spewing, instead I'll respond with:
"What people aren't remembering about the history of DDT is that, in many places, it failed to eradicate malaria not because of environmentalist restrictions on its use but because it simply stopped working. Insects have a phenomenal capacity to adapt to new poisons; anything that kills a large proportion of a population ends up changing the insects' genetic composition so as to favor those few individuals that manage to survive due to random mutation. In the continued presence of the insecticide, susceptible populations can be rapidly replaced by resistant ones. Though widespread use of DDT didn't begin until WWII, there were resistant houseflies in Europe by 1947, and by 1949, DDT-resistant mosquitoes were documented on two continents."
"However, some green anarchist militants have taken singularitarian rhetoric seriously enough to have called for violent direct action to stop the Singularity."
That's awesome.:-)
The Singularity needs to be green anarchist for this very reason alone.
I'm sure a can of spray paint or magic marker will do just fine. Spit on the camera. Just cover it up with a sticker. Do this often enough and the cost of maintaining these customized ad machines will make the costs of this type of advertising soar.
I had a similar problem as the article submitter, and it turned out that ATI Catalyst had for some reason changed something with my drivers. This was fixed by uninstalling the drivers and reinstalling.
In addition, I've found that a fan jammed with dust will start causing system instability.
A failing power supply can do the same.
There's a lot of video cards that have some thin fans that have a tendency to cake with dust and defeat the purpose of having a heatsink with fan.
meh - I'd start with physically attempting to offset the read/write head to look between tracks. The idea is there will be some overlap in the tracks, as each bit is expected to be overwritten by a zero. If each bit is a zero, there maybe a method to find enough differentiation to reconstruct the data. Now if it was overwritten with/dev/random - well then it's worth giving up on immediately... unless someone is truly masochistic and has nothing better to do for about a month. I believe it would require a couple random wipes with random data to insure the random data overlaps the track edges. Reconstructing the super positioned data between the tracks would be ridiculous to do unless an area with a known data structure is found - like the start of the file allocation table.
Doing this for $500 just isn't worth the time and effort. I don't think you would need a magnetic force microscope to do this though... the built-in read-write head should be sufficient. You'd need to modify the circuit that controls the track positioning for the read/write head. The data would then need to be captured using something like an oscilloscope and dumped to another larger hard drive. Custom software would most likely need to be developed to do the post signal capture analysis - ideally a simple program to convert the data into a disk image, which can then be applied to a drive using common unix or windows tools. Maybe capturing a reference signal from the original tracks would be useful before putting it through the differentiating circuit/algorithm.
A magnetic force microscope would only be needed if the signal is too weak to differentiate for even the read/write head from background noise.
A data recovery firm would have to work closely with the drive manufacturer to find out details about the specific model, or this would require special funding for the drive manufacturer.
I'd say some people like the Obama administration would have an interest in funding the data recovery of the lost White House emails during the Bush administration...
Oh well - I'm Canadian and wouldn't qualify for the contest anyway - it says American companies only.
You'd think they would just redirect the majority of the programmers into working on... video games.
Those sell no matter how bad the economy seems to get, and I thought Microsoft was serious about controlling that market.
Then again, I've never liked the Xbox, or most of Microsoft's games. meh, hopefully EA gets an influx of talent cause of this. Even though numerous Slashdot users paint them as an oppressive employer, I prefer most of the titles they carry to the games coming out of Microsoft. However, Valve is definitely my favourite... I just wish they'd get on-board with Linux. Hell, I'd love to see them use Linux as a way to make a customized gaming OS. But then Linux would need more support from the video card manufacturers... make binary only drivers if it means we'll get good 3d performance. I'm sick of this video performance handicap.
Too bad not everyone plays their fair part in the gift economy. Instead, there's a very high likelihood, that Google can just take the ideas that are submitted, and implement them without providing any reward to the submitter.
Even if there's some EULA/Contract/legal stuff that Google provides at first, good luck taking them to court and winning against this multi-billion dollar corporation.
There's also the problem of providing relevant ideas. In a public forum listing ideas, there maybe many very good ones, but may hold no relevance to a corporation like Google. By posting the non-relevant idea, you then leave that idea open to the public, where some other corporation who has no intention to 'play fair' at all, can take it, and become profitable, or completely ruin the idea by implementing it poorly and creating an atmosphere of negative public opinion.
I don't blame people for -not- sharing their ideas, even if they never have the resources, time, or dedication to see them through. In the wrong forum, you may face nothing but hostility, and ignorance, because the audience just doesn't understand what you're presenting, or finds your idea a threat to theirs.
Well there's a few problems when it comes down to scattering based optics...
Part of it comes down to an overall loss of irradiance. Some of that light will inevitably be absorbed by the scattering media, and only portions will be scattered. So then you're reducing the overall power to light conversion efficiency.
Then, for this type of arrangement, you would require volumetric scattering. So then you would need a nearly solid glass bulb with scattering material inside. I imagine using that amount of glass would really undermine the profitability of such a product. Using something like a liquid, would then introduce other problems, like the scattering material might settle, and then you would have uneven scattering.
To make something like this work in a light bulb design, and make it practical, the light bulb would need it's tip coated in some type of partially reflective and scattering material, that would then make the centre of the beam diffuse into the upper parts of the bulb, which would then need it's own scattering material to make the light bulb as much of a Lambertian point source as possible.
It's a difficult problem. I really doubt that you would want a bulb of cloudy water in your light sockets.
Something like this would need to be tackled with multiple LEDs in a single bulb, and then scattering the light... LEDs are still highly directional, even when they encase these things in lenses to expand the beam - which they almost always do already.
Making the light scatter is easy. Making is scatter in a way consumers will purchase, is a lot more difficult.
When I was just a youngin' we could only buy 32 MB mp3 players. You had to buy an expansion card to increase the memory on these things.
Yep, I bought the Diamond Rio - the first mp3 player to arrive on the market. I spent $350 on it, it had 32 MB, and there was an expansion slot on the bottom. The battery holder would break easily. So when you start walking with it partially damaged, it would just open up and release the single AA battery onto the floor. I replaced them under the extended warranty some many times, that the retailer offered me a different brand with an unheard of 64 MB of storage!!
One late night, between Christmas and New Years Eve, I was stopped at a police check point looking for drunk drivers. The officer noticed I had some strange black box attached to a wire that went somewhere - it was attached to a tape adapter for my crappy car stereo. He asked to look at it, and after some hesitation, I handed him my mp3 player. He then asked for my driver's license, which made little sense to me at that point... so I give it to him, and he starts trying to shove it into the memory card expansion slot! So I speak up, and ask him why he's trying to rape my mp3 player with my driver's license. He responds with "mp3? what's that? Isn't this a radar detector?" Now police radar detectors in most of Canada are illegal... he gives it back to me and lets me go. I don't think he even asked if I was drinking. Funny enough, my car reeked of pot at the time, and I was concerned about that... never thought I'd be saved from potential arrest by some new gadget.
I still use an mp3 CD player though, despite the heavily taxed CD-Rs here. A spindle of 100 CD-Rs costs $60 because of that stupid tax. Meanwhile, a spindle of DVD-Rs costs $25... too bad I don't have a portable mp3 DVD player.
You're putting all the light at a focal point. This would be the equivalent of having the lens too close to the ant, with it out of focus... the ant will just be rather bright.
What I'm saying with the microwave beam is that you can't focus it that finely. Instead the system would be transmitting from many point sources, and the beam just can't be that easily focused without having a huuuuuge dish.
One of the earlier proposals from the JPL was to use a phase-injected array of magnetrons to provide a steered microwave beam. That beam will still be really, really wide... remember the wavelength of EM energy we're dealing with is on the order of centimeters in length... the EM energy going through your magnifying glass is nanometers in length. You can easily focus that energy with a 1" magnifying glass... when it comes to microwaves, especially from GEO, it's just not going to be that focused. Even if you scale this up to multi-gigawatts... let's say 1000 GW - the entire US demand for electricity at the end of 2007. If that power was beamed down from the sky at 100% efficiency, over an area of land of 100km x 100km, that's only 100 W/m2... now if we reduce that down to an area like 20km x 20km, it's 2.5 kW/m2 - that's probably not safe.
But at 100 W/m2 it should be okay... obviously there's no single 100 km x 100 km site that's practical, so you have different sites around the country... makes sense anyhow - you don't want all the power in one spot anyhow.
Every single paper explaining this project basically cites the beam as being highly divergent and requiring - a very large field - to harvest the power.
An anonymous poster further up however provides the best response about risks -
- the amount of rocket launches required to implement a system on the scale we'd want would basically destroy the ozone layer.
That's not acceptable by any means... that risks killing off large portions of the biosphere. Most photosynthetic plants really don't like UV light in any higher dose than necessary. It's one thing to zap them with a single short pulse, it's another thing to provide continous wave ionization of the epidermis...
The military application has always been the ability to have a power source anywhere the forces go in the world.
Death beam from above isn't practical using this system, they'd more likely use orbital death rods, fission reaction powered gamma/x-ray beam, or good ole missiles.
I vote the idea down simply for the damage we'll do launching that many rockets into space.
The power density would probably never be high enough to turn it into a death ray. Anything in the RF region would diverge terribly, and would need a multiple square km receiving array.
The death ray concern is the least of the problems behind this idea. Lasers really are out of the question as well in my opinion. What's the point of converting laser light with photovoltiacs on the ground when we could just do that for the regular sunlight that we receive? In addition to that, the dc to laser power efficiency for the desired wavelengths just don't seem to exist.
You do realize that most foreign countries get these sort of facilities because they offer large grants to corporations to build them in their country.
I personally would like to have an R&D job within North America, they don't all have to go overseas...
And on a semi-related note... Battery by Metallica.
This is exactly what I've been arguing since they made this idea public: How does the money get spread? Who does it go to? The labels? The artists? Is it strictly on radio play and the charts? Or does the number of times a song gets downloaded come into play? How the fuck are they going to make this fair at all??! And how do they plan on monitoring this without blatantly spying on everyone using the Internet? And if it comes down to the number of times a song is downloaded, what stops someone from fraudulently making their song get downloaded more? I'd like to see how the CD-R media tax gets paid out currently... it's probably a total joke.
This is just some half-baked plan that won't work.
The copyright 'system' should probably get scrapped and a new set of copyright laws and rights should be introduced, one that makes sense with the 'Information Age' - fuck I hate that term.
Would people apply for a cut of the cash? What if a band doesn't release CDs, but people post recordings of their shows online - do they get a cut? Is registration with either of these agencies required to get a cut?
This is obviously the idea of people who HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE ON HOW THE INTERNET WORKS.
There's only one way around this whole problem - setup a massive website, that's not run by either of these agencies, but reports to them, and the government, that hosts all the music, and basically lets Canadians download for free from it. Which kind of defeats the whole purpose of taxing the ISP, as people should just be expected to pay for the content when they download it from said massive music website. So if they go with this idea, this way - statistics on listeners, viewership, can be gathered, the taxes on the ISPs can then go towards content in a 'fair' way - but how's this fair to all the people who don't download music, movies or any media?
Maybe the telecommunications providers should just focus on providing bandwidth, and pool their resources into a common media database. Then prices and payouts can be fairly distributed by on-demand content. That's probably the ideal outcome... this way bandwidth costs by the ISPs can be lowered as they could just have a direct link into the database, or host it themselves, and basically make programs like Bittorrent pointless for Canadian content.
Having this run by a government organization is just asking for disgusting amounts of waste, but having a single private organization implies a monopoly... the alternative could be a single very public organization, that basically shares all it's meeting information, allows the public to be involved, open forums, anonymous posting ability, details the operating costs, basically leave themselves open to insane amounts of criticism, and character attacks on the people operating it.
If that was to happen, you can count on a copyright war between countries then... as Canada would have protected it's own media interests, but not any other nation's... then again, it's not like anyone else gives a fuck about us anyway. Too bad we signed onto things like the WIPO.
Plus I think SOCAN is absolutely insane. 51% Canadian media content for all Canadian commercial websites!? What if the content provided by Canadians just can't keep up with that from the rest of the world? They're basically going to destroy commercial media enterprises by trying to get shit like that passed... Canadians will just go elsewhere online and find the content they want, view the ads those people provide, make other people in other countries money...
If they want Canadian media to remain competitive online, is make the massive database, and tax the ISPs... they'll just put the costs on the consumers anyway - so they might as well just make it a services tax directly to the consumer. Cable companies should probably be evolving their TV services anyway, and could offer TVoIP where customers subscribe to custom media playlists offered by a variety of people through the super-massive-media-database.
What's the name of your band? Lord of the Onion Rings?
Slashdot Mirror
Come on - a woman as head of cybersecurity? This is like trolling the entire male IT world. If there's any single woman who's computer is going to be the focus of internet attacks - it's going to be hers. :-)
It's not that I have anything with women in positions of authority, but this is different - I think Obama is underestimating the collective power of the patriarchal IT industry.
Rule 34 if she looks anything like that actress named Anne.
This was going to be an angry post at the Crichtonite crap that you're spewing, instead I'll respond with:
"What people aren't remembering about the history of DDT is that, in many places, it failed to eradicate malaria not because of environmentalist restrictions on its use but because it simply stopped working. Insects have a phenomenal capacity to adapt to new poisons; anything that kills a large proportion of a population ends up changing the insects' genetic composition so as to favor those few individuals that manage to survive due to random mutation. In the continued presence of the insecticide, susceptible populations can be rapidly replaced by resistant ones. Though widespread use of DDT didn't begin until WWII, there were resistant houseflies in Europe by 1947, and by 1949, DDT-resistant mosquitoes were documented on two continents."
Source
Do I need to get you more sources?
"However, some green anarchist militants have taken singularitarian rhetoric seriously enough to have called for violent direct action to stop the Singularity."
That's awesome. :-)
The Singularity needs to be green anarchist for this very reason alone.
heh put the bong down man.
At least they left the radio in ... there's enough mechanics that will remove the car stereo without putting it back.
I like how I have Microsoft DRM add-ons in Firefox. I don't remember installing those...
Computers are stupid anyway. I'm not too concerned.
I'm sure a can of spray paint or magic marker will do just fine. Spit on the camera. Just cover it up with a sticker. Do this often enough and the cost of maintaining these customized ad machines will make the costs of this type of advertising soar.
I had a similar problem as the article submitter, and it turned out that ATI Catalyst had for some reason changed something with my drivers. This was fixed by uninstalling the drivers and reinstalling.
In addition, I've found that a fan jammed with dust will start causing system instability.
A failing power supply can do the same.
There's a lot of video cards that have some thin fans that have a tendency to cake with dust and defeat the purpose of having a heatsink with fan.
meh - I'd start with physically attempting to offset the read/write head to look between tracks. The idea is there will be some overlap in the tracks, as each bit is expected to be overwritten by a zero. If each bit is a zero, there maybe a method to find enough differentiation to reconstruct the data. Now if it was overwritten with /dev/random - well then it's worth giving up on immediately ... unless someone is truly masochistic and has nothing better to do for about a month. I believe it would require a couple random wipes with random data to insure the random data overlaps the track edges. Reconstructing the super positioned data between the tracks would be ridiculous to do unless an area with a known data structure is found - like the start of the file allocation table.
Doing this for $500 just isn't worth the time and effort. I don't think you would need a magnetic force microscope to do this though ... the built-in read-write head should be sufficient. You'd need to modify the circuit that controls the track positioning for the read/write head. The data would then need to be captured using something like an oscilloscope and dumped to another larger hard drive. Custom software would most likely need to be developed to do the post signal capture analysis - ideally a simple program to convert the data into a disk image, which can then be applied to a drive using common unix or windows tools. Maybe capturing a reference signal from the original tracks would be useful before putting it through the differentiating circuit/algorithm.
A magnetic force microscope would only be needed if the signal is too weak to differentiate for even the read/write head from background noise.
A data recovery firm would have to work closely with the drive manufacturer to find out details about the specific model, or this would require special funding for the drive manufacturer.
I'd say some people like the Obama administration would have an interest in funding the data recovery of the lost White House emails during the Bush administration...
Oh well - I'm Canadian and wouldn't qualify for the contest anyway - it says American companies only.
I bet that she spends most of her day with low-life scums. Maybe - one day she can have her very own genetically engineered, low-life scum.
You'd think they would just redirect the majority of the programmers into working on ... video games.
Those sell no matter how bad the economy seems to get, and I thought Microsoft was serious about controlling that market.
Then again, I've never liked the Xbox, or most of Microsoft's games. meh, hopefully EA gets an influx of talent cause of this. Even though numerous Slashdot users paint them as an oppressive employer, I prefer most of the titles they carry to the games coming out of Microsoft. However, Valve is definitely my favourite ... I just wish they'd get on-board with Linux. Hell, I'd love to see them use Linux as a way to make a customized gaming OS. But then Linux would need more support from the video card manufacturers... make binary only drivers if it means we'll get good 3d performance. I'm sick of this video performance handicap.
They have billions of dollars, random letter writers typically don't. That's how.
Too bad not everyone plays their fair part in the gift economy. Instead, there's a very high likelihood, that Google can just take the ideas that are submitted, and implement them without providing any reward to the submitter.
Even if there's some EULA/Contract/legal stuff that Google provides at first, good luck taking them to court and winning against this multi-billion dollar corporation.
There's also the problem of providing relevant ideas. In a public forum listing ideas, there maybe many very good ones, but may hold no relevance to a corporation like Google. By posting the non-relevant idea, you then leave that idea open to the public, where some other corporation who has no intention to 'play fair' at all, can take it, and become profitable, or completely ruin the idea by implementing it poorly and creating an atmosphere of negative public opinion.
I don't blame people for -not- sharing their ideas, even if they never have the resources, time, or dedication to see them through. In the wrong forum, you may face nothing but hostility, and ignorance, because the audience just doesn't understand what you're presenting, or finds your idea a threat to theirs.
Sounds like a nice idea however.
Well there's a few problems when it comes down to scattering based optics...
Part of it comes down to an overall loss of irradiance. Some of that light will inevitably be absorbed by the scattering media, and only portions will be scattered. So then you're reducing the overall power to light conversion efficiency.
Then, for this type of arrangement, you would require volumetric scattering. So then you would need a nearly solid glass bulb with scattering material inside. I imagine using that amount of glass would really undermine the profitability of such a product. Using something like a liquid, would then introduce other problems, like the scattering material might settle, and then you would have uneven scattering.
To make something like this work in a light bulb design, and make it practical, the light bulb would need it's tip coated in some type of partially reflective and scattering material, that would then make the centre of the beam diffuse into the upper parts of the bulb, which would then need it's own scattering material to make the light bulb as much of a Lambertian point source as possible.
It's a difficult problem. I really doubt that you would want a bulb of cloudy water in your light sockets.
Something like this would need to be tackled with multiple LEDs in a single bulb, and then scattering the light... LEDs are still highly directional, even when they encase these things in lenses to expand the beam - which they almost always do already.
Making the light scatter is easy. Making is scatter in a way consumers will purchase, is a lot more difficult.
When I was just a youngin' we could only buy 32 MB mp3 players. You had to buy an expansion card to increase the memory on these things.
Yep, I bought the Diamond Rio - the first mp3 player to arrive on the market. I spent $350 on it, it had 32 MB, and there was an expansion slot on the bottom. The battery holder would break easily. So when you start walking with it partially damaged, it would just open up and release the single AA battery onto the floor. I replaced them under the extended warranty some many times, that the retailer offered me a different brand with an unheard of 64 MB of storage!!
One late night, between Christmas and New Years Eve, I was stopped at a police check point looking for drunk drivers. The officer noticed I had some strange black box attached to a wire that went somewhere - it was attached to a tape adapter for my crappy car stereo. He asked to look at it, and after some hesitation, I handed him my mp3 player. He then asked for my driver's license, which made little sense to me at that point ... so I give it to him, and he starts trying to shove it into the memory card expansion slot! So I speak up, and ask him why he's trying to rape my mp3 player with my driver's license. He responds with "mp3? what's that? Isn't this a radar detector?" Now police radar detectors in most of Canada are illegal... he gives it back to me and lets me go. I don't think he even asked if I was drinking. Funny enough, my car reeked of pot at the time, and I was concerned about that ... never thought I'd be saved from potential arrest by some new gadget.
I still use an mp3 CD player though, despite the heavily taxed CD-Rs here. A spindle of 100 CD-Rs costs $60 because of that stupid tax. Meanwhile, a spindle of DVD-Rs costs $25 ... too bad I don't have a portable mp3 DVD player.
I'm sure we can get some computer generated trolling happening if you so desire.
The IEEE seem to think they're legitimate posts. ;-)
*sigh* Why write a summary when it excludes the most relevant piece of information?
The summary for this article is fail.
Exactly what I thought.
Now I can't decide who the real stoners are - the ones that identified the correct distance as 420 km - or the ones who measured it at 620 km....
Maybe this is old news and we just don't know cause we never cared to know before...
That's a poor analogy.
You're putting all the light at a focal point. This would be the equivalent of having the lens too close to the ant, with it out of focus... the ant will just be rather bright.
What I'm saying with the microwave beam is that you can't focus it that finely. Instead the system would be transmitting from many point sources, and the beam just can't be that easily focused without having a huuuuuge dish.
One of the earlier proposals from the JPL was to use a phase-injected array of magnetrons to provide a steered microwave beam. That beam will still be really, really wide ... remember the wavelength of EM energy we're dealing with is on the order of centimeters in length ... the EM energy going through your magnifying glass is nanometers in length. You can easily focus that energy with a 1" magnifying glass... when it comes to microwaves, especially from GEO, it's just not going to be that focused. Even if you scale this up to multi-gigawatts ... let's say 1000 GW - the entire US demand for electricity at the end of 2007. If that power was beamed down from the sky at 100% efficiency, over an area of land of 100km x 100km, that's only 100 W/m2 ... now if we reduce that down to an area like 20km x 20km, it's 2.5 kW/m2 - that's probably not safe.
But at 100 W/m2 it should be okay ... obviously there's no single 100 km x 100 km site that's practical, so you have different sites around the country... makes sense anyhow - you don't want all the power in one spot anyhow.
Every single paper explaining this project basically cites the beam as being highly divergent and requiring - a very large field - to harvest the power.
An anonymous poster further up however provides the best response about risks -
- the amount of rocket launches required to implement a system on the scale we'd want would basically destroy the ozone layer.
That's not acceptable by any means ... that risks killing off large portions of the biosphere. Most photosynthetic plants really don't like UV light in any higher dose than necessary. It's one thing to zap them with a single short pulse, it's another thing to provide continous wave ionization of the epidermis...
The military application has always been the ability to have a power source anywhere the forces go in the world.
Death beam from above isn't practical using this system, they'd more likely use orbital death rods, fission reaction powered gamma/x-ray beam, or good ole missiles.
I vote the idea down simply for the damage we'll do launching that many rockets into space.
The power density would probably never be high enough to turn it into a death ray. Anything in the RF region would diverge terribly, and would need a multiple square km receiving array.
The death ray concern is the least of the problems behind this idea. Lasers really are out of the question as well in my opinion. What's the point of converting laser light with photovoltiacs on the ground when we could just do that for the regular sunlight that we receive? In addition to that, the dc to laser power efficiency for the desired wavelengths just don't seem to exist.
Dr. Dickinson? :-)
You do realize that most foreign countries get these sort of facilities because they offer large grants to corporations to build them in their country.
I personally would like to have an R&D job within North America, they don't all have to go overseas ...
And on a semi-related note ... Battery by Metallica.
Does anyone know if the Tesla cards still work as a GPU for ... let's say Counterstrike?
Sometimes, after pwning some numbers, I want to pwn some n00bs.
...is found in the article, in this image.
This is exactly what I've been arguing since they made this idea public: How does the money get spread? Who does it go to? The labels? The artists? Is it strictly on radio play and the charts? Or does the number of times a song gets downloaded come into play? How the fuck are they going to make this fair at all??! And how do they plan on monitoring this without blatantly spying on everyone using the Internet? And if it comes down to the number of times a song is downloaded, what stops someone from fraudulently making their song get downloaded more? I'd like to see how the CD-R media tax gets paid out currently ... it's probably a total joke.
This is just some half-baked plan that won't work.
The copyright 'system' should probably get scrapped and a new set of copyright laws and rights should be introduced, one that makes sense with the 'Information Age' - fuck I hate that term.
Would people apply for a cut of the cash? What if a band doesn't release CDs, but people post recordings of their shows online - do they get a cut? Is registration with either of these agencies required to get a cut?
This is obviously the idea of people who HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE ON HOW THE INTERNET WORKS.
There's only one way around this whole problem - setup a massive website, that's not run by either of these agencies, but reports to them, and the government, that hosts all the music, and basically lets Canadians download for free from it. Which kind of defeats the whole purpose of taxing the ISP, as people should just be expected to pay for the content when they download it from said massive music website. So if they go with this idea, this way - statistics on listeners, viewership, can be gathered, the taxes on the ISPs can then go towards content in a 'fair' way - but how's this fair to all the people who don't download music, movies or any media?
Maybe the telecommunications providers should just focus on providing bandwidth, and pool their resources into a common media database. Then prices and payouts can be fairly distributed by on-demand content. That's probably the ideal outcome ... this way bandwidth costs by the ISPs can be lowered as they could just have a direct link into the database, or host it themselves, and basically make programs like Bittorrent pointless for Canadian content.
Having this run by a government organization is just asking for disgusting amounts of waste, but having a single private organization implies a monopoly ... the alternative could be a single very public organization, that basically shares all it's meeting information, allows the public to be involved, open forums, anonymous posting ability, details the operating costs, basically leave themselves open to insane amounts of criticism, and character attacks on the people operating it.
If that was to happen, you can count on a copyright war between countries then ... as Canada would have protected it's own media interests, but not any other nation's ... then again, it's not like anyone else gives a fuck about us anyway. Too bad we signed onto things like the WIPO.
Plus I think SOCAN is absolutely insane. 51% Canadian media content for all Canadian commercial websites!? What if the content provided by Canadians just can't keep up with that from the rest of the world? They're basically going to destroy commercial media enterprises by trying to get shit like that passed ... Canadians will just go elsewhere online and find the content they want, view the ads those people provide, make other people in other countries money...
If they want Canadian media to remain competitive online, is make the massive database, and tax the ISPs... they'll just put the costs on the consumers anyway - so they might as well just make it a services tax directly to the consumer. Cable companies should probably be evolving their TV services anyway, and could offer TVoIP where customers subscribe to custom media playlists offered by a variety of people through the super-massive-media-database.
What's the name of your band? Lord of the Onion Rings?