"Sound Cards are being targetted also. If Ms. Rosen has her way, "Watermarked" content will not be rippable because of hardware protection implemented in the new cards"
The RIAA is going through the classic crisis in the concept of property introduced by digital information.
Since the invention of records and up to recently, music could never be found "living" outside of their wax drums, or vinyl disks, or cassette tapes. This was also true with books and photos, where the information could never be found "outside the paper". In short, up to recently, the medium and its content were inseparable from each other. As a result, humanity at large have blissfully mixed the commerce of media, which are physical numerable objects, and their content.
Now that digital technology have split the two (you can have music or books or photos "floating around" as pure data), a millenia-old way of trading properties is totally crumbling : one cannot be sure that selling one medium-object sells exactly one copy of the content. The reason why traditional commerce of medium-objects works is because, up to today, it was harder or more expensive to copy the content onto a new medium than acquire a legit new copy. This is not true anymore : the lines have crossed, and it's now easier, cheaper and more convenient to copy the content than to acquire a legit copy.
This is not a new problem. When did the lines cross ? for certain types of documents, like music sheets, the photocopier was a disaster (and publishers fought the photocopier). For music, the lines crossed when people could copy their audio cassettes with only a little quality loss. The lines haven't crossed for photographies, but I'm sure that won't take too long. Finally, books still sell as books today because people prefer paper books to LCD-equipped ebook, and it's still as hard to photocopy a paperback than to go buy it.
So, the RIAA is fighting a lost battle : because they can't keep the medium and the content inseparable, they're trying to impair all the playback and recording devices enough that the hard-to-copy/easier-to-buy lines cross back to what it was before. Of course, it's impossible : even if every CD player and every soundcard in the world had copy protection (which is not going to happen, cf. 1930s prohibition), people would still find an easy way around the protection. The RIAA's other way of making it harder to copy things is by making it more legally dangerous : they count on most people's fear of the policeman to deter them from copying things, and in some cases, people's intrinsic honesty. For that to work, because copies are so easy to make, they'd have to create an Orwellian police state, and that's actually a real possibility.
Of course, all traditional media companies are in the same boat. For example, when people will massively prefer E-paper over traditional books, book publishers will join forces with them, and that's not a prediction, that's a fact.
What's the solution ?
Well, there aren't many today : the traditional system of commerce with physical objects is so deeply rooted in human cultures that it's not going away anytime soon. A solution would be to create an entirely new economy for media contents from scratch. Not likely. Then, of course, if we had teleportation like in Star Trek, we could teleport medium-object as fast as we download data today, yet the teleported objects would retain their "object" property of uniqueness. Provided the teleportation process is free or very cheap, this would simply deprecate digital copies altogether. Again, not very likely.
What's in store for the near future ? the RIAA, MPAA, publishing companies and other traditional giant media companies dying a more or less slow death due to their new-found utter inadequacy, and as they go down, hurting people's rights by imposing shoddy products and by twisting the arm of the law to protect their dying business models, instead of reinventing themselves.
Brace yourself, it's going to hurt and it's only the beginning...
I hope someone will think of using this to broadcast pr0n videos live from remote places, like "antarctica upside down" or "easter island statue-hard III" or something.
... isn't Furscrape or Star Truck or Legs or any of that garbage : the pinnacle of space SciFi on TV is undeniably Red Dwarf.
Disguised Aussie accents in Farscape ? Lister's accent sure beats the smeg out of it. Food replicators in Star Trek ? small potatoes compared to cow vindaloo. Data the android ? how about Kryten the 3000 series mechanoid ? and 790 the robot head is really ugly compared to Holly.
Re:You own personal transponder
on
GPS Meets PCS
·
· Score: 1
Actually, precisely locating a cell phone based on which tower it is talking to, and determining where the cell phone is going by looking at which cells it enters and leaves, only works well in large cities. In rural areas or along roads, the cells are much larger.
If my memory is correct, one of the high visibility cases of such a tracking was the capture of Pablo Escobar. The DEA had to follow his cell phone for a long time and make educated guesses to be able to intercept him. On the other end, an integrated GPS device simply phones momma and gives away its position precisely by the meter, which is orders of magnitude better than cell positions.
How very convenient
on
GPS Meets PCS
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"The Samsung N300 phone will use GPS to track the people down"
... and if you happen to have a name that doesn't sound quite right, such as Al-something or Ben-something, you won't even have to dial 911 for the authorities to know where you are and where you're headed at all time.
Am I the only one to find the idea of mixing a wireless communication device and a very precise position locator undesirable ?
I have a Tivo with 30 hours. I usually record things in "medium" quality, so I guess I get no more than 15 hours in reality. But I virtually never run out of space. The only times I wish I had more space are :
When I go on a trip for several days
When some channel broadcasts a bunch of episodes of something I like in a single day (a something-"marathon" they call it)
But even if I could record all these things and keep them in memory, I'd never be able to watch them all anyway. I hardly watch everything my mere 30-hour Tivo records already.
The thing that I'd really really like to see appear in PVRs is a second tuner. Very often, choosing between two programs is the real bother, not the amount of memory. The only reason why single-tuner PVRs work nowadays is because interesting programs are so diluted in an ocean of crap on TV. Come to think of it, that's also probably why 15 hours are enough, because there aren't enough interesting programs per day to fill it up.
Okay, so we're all shocked by the WTC disaster (and the Pentagon attack too, although all media channels seem to blissfully ignore it for lack of terrible images to broadcast, but I digress). We've all donated blood and $$$, everybody is angry at the terrorists, Laden or someone else, America and its allies are determined to squash all terrorism (but the IRA) and everybody agrees with this.
Now, can we PLEASE do away with footages with shitty violonist music over it and stop pretending it's moving ? When will video and cinema people realize that a bland piece of tape isn't turned into a piece of art just because they slap a Schinlder's list soundtrack on top of it ?
It seems to me that dumping an unprofitable bandwidth hogging organization such as Slashdot would be an ideal restructuring move in the eyes of Exodus' execs. That would be a real bummer, Slashdot is such a vivid part of the Innurnet culture.
Cash is the lowest-denominator currency : it's a legal tender that involves no outside institutions such as banks and credit card companies. Should those institutions stop functioning (like during a nuclear war for example), cash would be the only means of payment.
moreover, some people rely on cash to survive, like beggars and very poor people : these people would not be allowed to get a credit card or check books, mostly because they have no address.
Finally, there has to be a way to be able to pay for something anonymously. It is necessary in a free society.
You can't buy (or make) a x node cluster and expect to run Quake x times faster : parallel processing machines require parallel programming. This is usually means that you want a cluster to solve a particular problem, that the problem is specified, the parallel application is properly designed, architectured and implemented.
I have the feeling that friend forgotten_password's group have no clue about Beowulf clusters.
Okay, so use FrontPage to create your page's layout, write all the words in the page that don't refer to M$, M$NBC, M$N such as "the", "tarball" or "grandmother", then complete your page with VI or EMACS, which are pieces of software released under a non-M$-centric license.
... then it'll be easy to spot terrorists : it will be all those who have software with no backdoor. Do these people really think outlaws will use law-abiding software ?
The bottom of the problem is that Victor should never ever have been granted a patent for RTlinux : there is plenty of prior art (DR-Multiuser-DOS, Concurrent DOS and even the current DR-DOS multitasker have been around for 15+ years and use the exact same technique). Moreover, Victor didn't "invent" all of RTlinux, his students did.
Considering that the patent is easily breakable in court, the FSF settled with Victor very easily. Why ? because RTlinux is irrelevant : RTAI is the way to go now. It provides all that RTlinux provides and much more, and it isn't encumbered by silly patents.
All in all, a much better move than it first appears by the FSF : they win on the PR front by making Victor change his license and they save money by not contesting a patent that isn't important anymore. Way to go guys !
Okay, so the UK have CCTV cameras all over the country. Net result ? they can squelch pretty thefts in high streets and issue speeding tickets automatically. Yet the IRA still strike. Gee, I wonder why the camera didn't pick them up.
British citizens have "chosen" to give up their freedom for nothing.
That's only one example. In France, there is a law that forbids people to use any kind of encryption. Net result ? Algerian terrorists, the ETA, the FLNC still plant bombs in the country. French people too have given up their freedom for nothing.
I'm all for giving up things that make it possible to catch terrorists, but freedom is not one of them. Watching people is not the solution.
I'm not a specialist in cooling and overclocking and things like that, but the question I have is : if modern processors can't survive themselves "as is" (i.e. without thermal protection), why don't processor manufacturer sell them with an integrated heat sink and a fan bolted on forever, as an integral part of the product ? Even better, the heat sink itself could be bolted through the sides of the processor, and adventurous overclockers could still replace it with whatever piece of heat removal wizardry they want. If nothing else, it would force motherboard manufacturers to invent stronger CPU socket to hold the CPU/heat sink combo.
The nuclear bomb, purely from the perspective of weaponry, is a agent of mass destruction. It is meant for conventional war theaters, with large army divisions concentrated in few places, or it can also obliterate whole cities and make entire countries unlivable for years.
From a more intelligent standpoint however, the nuclear arsenal is really only a dissuasive force that keep large ennemy countries (read USSR) from making rash military decisions. Moreover, it is quite proven that the atomic fire has a very pronounced psychological impact that conventional bombing doesn't have, but in fact conventional bombing is deadlier than nuclear bombing : many more people died in Germany in a matter of days due to conventional bombing at the end of WWII than in Japan due to the two atomic bombs.
So, I fail to see where nukes apply to combat terrorism : do you know a single place the size of a large city that is populated only by terrorists, with the added advantage of being free of innocent civilians in a 20 mile radius around it ?
Using a nuclear arm on even a small terrorist training camp (which is the largest concentration of terrorists you'll ever see) is very dumb indeed.
It seems to me that there are two ways for cell phone signals to be useful so long after these phones' last charge :
Someone with a very big clue realizes cell phone signals will be useful when rescue operations take place and convinces all the cell phone companies to shut down all the cell towers around the area of the disaster. That way, cell phones don't get any signal anymore and stop "talking" to the towers, therefore conserving battery energy. Afterward, during the rescue operations (now), cell towers are switched back on for a few minutes every 2 hours or so, and rescuers take advantage of these few minutes to scan the area for cell phone responses.
Buried victims who are still alive *and* still able to reach their cell phones *and* still able to think clearly enough realize that their cell phones may be useful to their future rescue, switch them off, then turn them on only a few minutes per day, to make a call, or hoping that someone will pick up their phones' signals.
These are the only two possibilities I can think of that would keep cell phones alive and somewhat usable so long after the tragedy. Sadly, I don't think either possibility is even remotely likely. Of course, I wish with all my heart that I'm wrong, and also that battery technology and power management are now advanced enough that lifes can be saved as a result.
I'm not a biologist, but there is a simple question that nags me : assuming there is life on Mars in the form of bacteria or lychens, where do they find nutrients ?
My understan7ding is that basic bacteria and other simple lifeforms transform certain chemicals into other chemicals using energy (usually sunlight). On Earth, the process is known to work because other organisms, usually higher in the food chain, degrade the new chemical back into the first kind of chemicals. It is also believed that the whole process was "jump-started" on Earth by incredibly high concentrations of primordial chemicals in the environment, high enough that the first unicellular lifeform would have time to both emerge then spawn other lifeforms to recycle the byproducts of its activity before the primordial chemicals would run out.
So, the question is, what's the theory with life on Mars ? obviously there has to be more than one lifeform, at least two, so that one degrades what the other produces. Strangely, I never see this issue appear in any life-on-Mars theory. Or do scientists assume a form of life that simply uses energy and consumes what it creates ?
I read a LOT of books every year. I've also read something like 10 "old" (i.e. non-copyrighted) books from the Gutemberg project on my PalmIII using the Doc reader. I've also tried the Franklin Rocket Ebook and a prototype of the Everybook reader (before they went under).
I hate reading on the Palm : the screen is too small, the contrast sucks and you have to scroll all the time, but the Palm is small and convenient enough to convince me not to load my suitcase sometimes. The Rocket Ebook was much better, but still not very exciting. The Everybook had that dual A4 color display that was big like an open window, and impressive, but I still was uneasy holding the thing to read.
So, it brought me to think about it : what do I like so much better in a book that even the near-perfect Everybook reader didn't provide ? well, of course, there is the fact that books don't need batteries, they are not nearly as fragile, they are less heavy than the majority of paperback releases (I'm not talking about Dostoyevsky). But there is more : the texture of the paper is gratifying to touch, the turning of a paper page is part of the pleasure of reading, the letters never have staircase effect, even if the printing is crappy, the white of the paper reflects different color shades with the lighting, one can see the sun dance on the pages at dawn or dusk while reading on the train, etc etc... Even the back, with its different material (cardboard), its artwork and sometimes embossed or golden letters is part of the reading experience.
So, to convince conventional "pleasure" readers, E-paper will have to have all of that : round letters, paper-like light reflection, paper-like texture, the exact same text layout than on a regular book. All of that is part of the joy of reading, and E-paper won't provide that for a long time. I, for one, never read for pleasure on any form of computer device. I read a lot of articles, financial reports, tech manuals, online and the cold screen light doesn't bother me because the reading is only pratical, but I would never read Azimov on anything else but a book.
Slashdot Mirror
The RIAA is going through the classic crisis in the concept of property introduced by digital information.
Since the invention of records and up to recently, music could never be found "living" outside of their wax drums, or vinyl disks, or cassette tapes. This was also true with books and photos, where the information could never be found "outside the paper". In short, up to recently, the medium and its content were inseparable from each other. As a result, humanity at large have blissfully mixed the commerce of media, which are physical numerable objects, and their content.
Now that digital technology have split the two (you can have music or books or photos "floating around" as pure data), a millenia-old way of trading properties is totally crumbling : one cannot be sure that selling one medium-object sells exactly one copy of the content. The reason why traditional commerce of medium-objects works is because, up to today, it was harder or more expensive to copy the content onto a new medium than acquire a legit new copy. This is not true anymore : the lines have crossed, and it's now easier, cheaper and more convenient to copy the content than to acquire a legit copy.
This is not a new problem. When did the lines cross ? for certain types of documents, like music sheets, the photocopier was a disaster (and publishers fought the photocopier). For music, the lines crossed when people could copy their audio cassettes with only a little quality loss. The lines haven't crossed for photographies, but I'm sure that won't take too long. Finally, books still sell as books today because people prefer paper books to LCD-equipped ebook, and it's still as hard to photocopy a paperback than to go buy it.
So, the RIAA is fighting a lost battle : because they can't keep the medium and the content inseparable, they're trying to impair all the playback and recording devices enough that the hard-to-copy/easier-to-buy lines cross back to what it was before. Of course, it's impossible : even if every CD player and every soundcard in the world had copy protection (which is not going to happen, cf. 1930s prohibition), people would still find an easy way around the protection. The RIAA's other way of making it harder to copy things is by making it more legally dangerous : they count on most people's fear of the policeman to deter them from copying things, and in some cases, people's intrinsic honesty. For that to work, because copies are so easy to make, they'd have to create an Orwellian police state, and that's actually a real possibility.
Of course, all traditional media companies are in the same boat. For example, when people will massively prefer E-paper over traditional books, book publishers will join forces with them, and that's not a prediction, that's a fact.
What's the solution ?
Well, there aren't many today : the traditional system of commerce with physical objects is so deeply rooted in human cultures that it's not going away anytime soon. A solution would be to create an entirely new economy for media contents from scratch. Not likely. Then, of course, if we had teleportation like in Star Trek, we could teleport medium-object as fast as we download data today, yet the teleported objects would retain their "object" property of uniqueness. Provided the teleportation process is free or very cheap, this would simply deprecate digital copies altogether. Again, not very likely.
What's in store for the near future ? the RIAA, MPAA, publishing companies and other traditional giant media companies dying a more or less slow death due to their new-found utter inadequacy, and as they go down, hurting people's rights by imposing shoddy products and by twisting the arm of the law to protect their dying business models, instead of reinventing themselves.
Brace yourself, it's going to hurt and it's only the beginning ...
I hope someone will think of using this to broadcast pr0n videos live from remote places, like "antarctica upside down" or "easter island statue-hard III" or something.
and that's probably why Gates is richer than Taco ;-)
I can just picture RMS in military fatigues ...
I bet IBM decided to hire Steven Ball to design the DeskStar 75GXP :-)
Disguised Aussie accents in Farscape ? Lister's accent sure beats the smeg out of it. Food replicators in Star Trek ? small potatoes compared to cow vindaloo. Data the android ? how about Kryten the 3000 series mechanoid ? and 790 the robot head is really ugly compared to Holly.
If my memory is correct, one of the high visibility cases of such a tracking was the capture of Pablo Escobar. The DEA had to follow his cell phone for a long time and make educated guesses to be able to intercept him. On the other end, an integrated GPS device simply phones momma and gives away its position precisely by the meter, which is orders of magnitude better than cell positions.
Am I the only one to find the idea of mixing a wireless communication device and a very precise position locator undesirable ?
When I go on a trip for several days
When some channel broadcasts a bunch of episodes of something I like in a single day (a something-"marathon" they call it)
But even if I could record all these things and keep them in memory, I'd never be able to watch them all anyway. I hardly watch everything my mere 30-hour Tivo records already.
The thing that I'd really really like to see appear in PVRs is a second tuner. Very often, choosing between two programs is the real bother, not the amount of memory. The only reason why single-tuner PVRs work nowadays is because interesting programs are so diluted in an ocean of crap on TV. Come to think of it, that's also probably why 15 hours are enough, because there aren't enough interesting programs per day to fill it up.
Now, can we PLEASE do away with footages with shitty violonist music over it and stop pretending it's moving ? When will video and cinema people realize that a bland piece of tape isn't turned into a piece of art just because they slap a Schinlder's list soundtrack on top of it ?
It seems to me that dumping an unprofitable bandwidth hogging organization such as Slashdot would be an ideal restructuring move in the eyes of Exodus' execs. That would be a real bummer, Slashdot is such a vivid part of the Innurnet culture.
moreover, some people rely on cash to survive, like beggars and very poor people : these people would not be allowed to get a credit card or check books, mostly because they have no address.
Finally, there has to be a way to be able to pay for something anonymously. It is necessary in a free society.
Keep cash alive ! :-)
I have the feeling that friend forgotten_password's group have no clue about Beowulf clusters.
Okay, so use FrontPage to create your page's layout, write all the words in the page that don't refer to M$, M$NBC, M$N such as "the", "tarball" or "grandmother", then complete your page with VI or EMACS, which are pieces of software released under a non-M$-centric license.
... then it'll be easy to spot terrorists : it will be all those who have software with no backdoor. Do these people really think outlaws will use law-abiding software ?
Americans would do anything do get to know French women more intimately ...
Considering that the patent is easily breakable in court, the FSF settled with Victor very easily. Why ? because RTlinux is irrelevant : RTAI is the way to go now. It provides all that RTlinux provides and much more, and it isn't encumbered by silly patents.
All in all, a much better move than it first appears by the FSF : they win on the PR front by making Victor change his license and they save money by not contesting a patent that isn't important anymore. Way to go guys !
British citizens have "chosen" to give up their freedom for nothing.
That's only one example. In France, there is a law that forbids people to use any kind of encryption. Net result ? Algerian terrorists, the ETA, the FLNC still plant bombs in the country. French people too have given up their freedom for nothing.
I'm all for giving up things that make it possible to catch terrorists, but freedom is not one of them. Watching people is not the solution.
I'm not a specialist in cooling and overclocking and things like that, but the question I have is : if modern processors can't survive themselves "as is" (i.e. without thermal protection), why don't processor manufacturer sell them with an integrated heat sink and a fan bolted on forever, as an integral part of the product ? Even better, the heat sink itself could be bolted through the sides of the processor, and adventurous overclockers could still replace it with whatever piece of heat removal wizardry they want. If nothing else, it would force motherboard manufacturers to invent stronger CPU socket to hold the CPU/heat sink combo.
From a more intelligent standpoint however, the nuclear arsenal is really only a dissuasive force that keep large ennemy countries (read USSR) from making rash military decisions. Moreover, it is quite proven that the atomic fire has a very pronounced psychological impact that conventional bombing doesn't have, but in fact conventional bombing is deadlier than nuclear bombing : many more people died in Germany in a matter of days due to conventional bombing at the end of WWII than in Japan due to the two atomic bombs.
So, I fail to see where nukes apply to combat terrorism : do you know a single place the size of a large city that is populated only by terrorists, with the added advantage of being free of innocent civilians in a 20 mile radius around it ?
Using a nuclear arm on even a small terrorist training camp (which is the largest concentration of terrorists you'll ever see) is very dumb indeed.
Someone with a very big clue realizes cell phone signals will be useful when rescue operations take place and convinces all the cell phone companies to shut down all the cell towers around the area of the disaster. That way, cell phones don't get any signal anymore and stop "talking" to the towers, therefore conserving battery energy. Afterward, during the rescue operations (now), cell towers are switched back on for a few minutes every 2 hours or so, and rescuers take advantage of these few minutes to scan the area for cell phone responses.
Buried victims who are still alive *and* still able to reach their cell phones *and* still able to think clearly enough realize that their cell phones may be useful to their future rescue, switch them off, then turn them on only a few minutes per day, to make a call, or hoping that someone will pick up their phones' signals.
These are the only two possibilities I can think of that would keep cell phones alive and somewhat usable so long after the tragedy. Sadly, I don't think either possibility is even remotely likely. Of course, I wish with all my heart that I'm wrong, and also that battery technology and power management are now advanced enough that lifes can be saved as a result.
Hot damn, that's why I keep losing all my chess matches online : Bobby, will you please STOP PLAYING AGAINST ME ?
My understan7ding is that basic bacteria and other simple lifeforms transform certain chemicals into other chemicals using energy (usually sunlight). On Earth, the process is known to work because other organisms, usually higher in the food chain, degrade the new chemical back into the first kind of chemicals. It is also believed that the whole process was "jump-started" on Earth by incredibly high concentrations of primordial chemicals in the environment, high enough that the first unicellular lifeform would have time to both emerge then spawn other lifeforms to recycle the byproducts of its activity before the primordial chemicals would run out.
So, the question is, what's the theory with life on Mars ? obviously there has to be more than one lifeform, at least two, so that one degrades what the other produces. Strangely, I never see this issue appear in any life-on-Mars theory. Or do scientists assume a form of life that simply uses energy and consumes what it creates ?
I hate reading on the Palm : the screen is too small, the contrast sucks and you have to scroll all the time, but the Palm is small and convenient enough to convince me not to load my suitcase sometimes. The Rocket Ebook was much better, but still not very exciting. The Everybook had that dual A4 color display that was big like an open window, and impressive, but I still was uneasy holding the thing to read.
So, it brought me to think about it : what do I like so much better in a book that even the near-perfect Everybook reader didn't provide ? well, of course, there is the fact that books don't need batteries, they are not nearly as fragile, they are less heavy than the majority of paperback releases (I'm not talking about Dostoyevsky). But there is more : the texture of the paper is gratifying to touch, the turning of a paper page is part of the pleasure of reading, the letters never have staircase effect, even if the printing is crappy, the white of the paper reflects different color shades with the lighting, one can see the sun dance on the pages at dawn or dusk while reading on the train, etc etc ... Even the back, with its different material (cardboard), its artwork and sometimes embossed or golden letters is part of the reading experience.
So, to convince conventional "pleasure" readers, E-paper will have to have all of that : round letters, paper-like light reflection, paper-like texture, the exact same text layout than on a regular book. All of that is part of the joy of reading, and E-paper won't provide that for a long time. I, for one, never read for pleasure on any form of computer device. I read a lot of articles, financial reports, tech manuals, online and the cold screen light doesn't bother me because the reading is only pratical, but I would never read Azimov on anything else but a book.