Like so much of the so-called philosophy about The Matrix this seems fundamentally flawed.
It seems questionable in the extreme that seconds are a particularly significant measure of a person's life.
Breaking it down to nanoseconds or picoseconds doesn't fix the underlying issue of how we can say with certainty that human life is a series of discreet units similar to an animation.
Besides, you don't need The Martix to suggest that life is an illusion. You can show the same thing in a much more profound way using language theory.
I can't believe so many people are so missing the point.
I personally have, and no others who have their own class C's that are unrouteable because they applied for them personally back in the early eighties before the Net went corporate.
They just sit there unused and the reason is very simple --money. In order to route to those addresses you need to pay off the big money hustlas. Until they're gone, the squeeze is on.
And that's why we don't use IPv6. It's quite simple and the bottom line is cash dollars in the IP bubble economy.
My reading of US copyright law indicates that non-commercial, publicly accessible archives are allowed to make copies of copyrighted media for distribution to other such archives. This is in the first chapter under the fair use sub-section 107.
Do you think that BitTorrent fits the definition of a publicly accessible and non-commercial media archive?
If this isn't just a joke, I assume you're probably still on your first generation design because you say you used CDRs. I really did this, but before I started I set several different types of CDs and CDRs out in the sun to see how they would react. I found that CDRs were relatively unstable and delaminated relatively early compared to pressed CDRs. In addition, I noticed that they were much less reflective, at least when it came to visible light. This was easy to test. Just set them in the sun and angle them onto a wall and see which ones produced brighter reflections. The CDRs, both colored and silver, were very weak and diffuse compared to pressed CDs. CDRs have more of a prismatic effect than a mirror effect. That's cool, but it's not good for concentration.
I started off with a dual axis three meter sunflower made out of a hand woven geodesic wire mesh which looked cool, but it turned out to be way too flimsy. It held its own shape fine but the tracking was a bitch even in a very slight breeze and it got totally thrashed when the first good wind came. It was a total success as an art project but it wasn't practical. Only a few bucks in materials though and it produced scarry amounts of heat at the focal point for the short time it was functional.
So I switched to a much smaller linear trough design that worked for almost nine months before the CDs became thoroughly delaminated.
At that point I realized that glass mirrors really weren't that expensive when you took into account the labor of having to replace all those demalinated CDs. It's fun the first time, but when it becomes a regular chore it sucks and it can be discouraging which isn't good because concentrated solar really works.
I never got to the point where I could try a heat engine, but it definitely heated up water. Sandia's Sunlab has some awesome pics of commercial projects that got me interested and then there's the ever popular idea of the scroll compressor run backwards. Any news on that one?
And to go along with that one, what about the countries besides the US who don't belong to intellectual property treaties with the US and who have copyright laws that are still thirty or fifty years.
Since the Net is borderless, how can anybody expect to enforce American copyright overseas? And if it's not enforced overseas, how do we stop Americans from accessing overseas addresses?
I think PBS and NPR have done some great content and are still valuable, but I have to agree to an extent that the public airwaves stuff is crap when NPR won't let you download MP3s and PBS doesn't offer digital time shifting formats either. They have no right to call themselves public in the digital age with their restrictive polices. They're no better than any other corporate network.
In the Watergate era they were absolutely essential as an alternative media both polticially and in the society at large with PBS being the first to show nudity on American broadcast television and the Pacifica network's role in shaping obscenity law for broadcast media.
But the Net has made them somewhat irrelevant. This topic being a good case in point. They're using the net as a source and yet we won't be able to download the product. NPR in particular is very unfriendly to the net and Linux in particular. NPR only suported Linux audio by accident when Real Inc. made a Linux player. Prior to that, they took a rather cavalier attitude about if you don't use Microsoft, you're not a part of the community.
I think what you have to look at is the media context in which the prices are displayed.
It's quite true that many stores will try to prevent you from making recordings of any kinds on their physical premises. I've been reprimanded by store managers many times for taking photos in the store. But their right to prevent me from creating media on their premises is based on their property rights, not any some legally backed authority to censror the media.
The web is a totally different story. I use web scrapers all the time and a site that doesn't like it can kindly take its ass off the web. Once you place material on the web, it is published. If you don't want to publish your prices, you don't have to. That's like publishing a book and complaining the readers read it too fast.
The people who compain about such things are the idiots who create unworkable business plans based on their own assumptions about how people are going to use the resource. This is an interesting issue with news media that want to sell access to their archives. There's no way they can both publish to the web and prevent me from caching old copies. If that's the business plan then web publishing is an inappropriate business decision and guess who should pay for bad business decisions: the consumer, or the fool who pursued an ignorant business plan?
Yeah, and a PLD wireless transciever to reach those higher frequencies would be even more fun.
But I think your casual dismissal of the relevance of open source is misguided. In a closed source environment where a single vendor controls vast swaths of the market, there's little incentive to innovate in disruptive ways. This is a disruptive technology as it would potentially make many incompatible pieces of equipment irrelevant. While it could technically have been done in any language I would not say that open source is irrelevant to this project.
Thanks, and feel free to spread the word. I think this is an extremely important point with particular bearing on the P2P issue since the core use of P2P is as a distributed archival system. If this is true, then the law already protects it in wording that preceeds the Betamax decision.
The archive issue is also important for other reasons as well. People like Ted Turner use the argument that archives are expensive to maintain so they're doing the public a service by keeping the material in a private archive. If P2P clearly identifies itself as a distributed archive technology then these policies will have to be restated to reflect the reality which is that the motive is to restrict fair use provisions of federal copyright law. This kind of behavior should be revealed for what it is --selling desks on the first day of class. Nobody owns the media under federal law.
I feel that the majority of the people screaming loudest and casting about derogatory terms like piracy and thievery are those who were duped the hardest by the CD scam. I know people like this. They would spend like a third of their pay check month in and month out over the years stocking up on thousands of CDs so they could have the ultimate media collection. These folks had social problems from the start and it's not surprising that they're frothing at the mouth now. But that doesn't make them right.
Again though, do spread the word. This is something I have heard very little of although I've seen a lot of reference to the Betamax decision. Betamax is also relevant here, but I think the public non-commercial archive issue is much more appropriate and can be demonstrated in many ways from various angles.
Well the easy way to clarify this is for you to simply read the law. It's not too difficult. You're totally off the mark here because the passage I quoted which is the second heading under fair use in the first chapter of federal copyright law that comes right after personal fair use is about copies made for lending to other archives. You're talking about a parton borrowing a book from a library. These are two separate issues under the law as you will see when you go read it yourself as I'm sure you'll do as a responsible American.
If you want to argue that I'm misreading the text, your best bet is to argue the definition of an archive. However, in my research so far the only solid definitions that have been given with regards to copyright law and fair use are that it is non-commercial collection of text and electronic media that is open to the public. I doubt you will find a more restrictive definition because the nature of archives makes it difficult to create a restrictive definition, but if you find something, please post it.
Nice, but the law itself makes it even clearer. Libraries and archives can make and lend compies and they must be free and publicly available. P2P is an archive.
Read 'em and weep. This is from www.loc.gov/copyright Chapter 1. I abridged the subsections for brevity, but go look for yourself if you're suspicious, or even if you're not. Sharing is a right guaranteed by federal law.
± 108. Limitations on exclusive rights: Reproduction by libraries and archives39 (a) Except as otherwise provided in this title and notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement of copyright for a library or archives, or any of its employees acting within the scope of their employment, to reproduce no more than one copy or phonorecord of a work, except as provided in subsections (b) and (c), or to distribute such copy or phonorecord, under the conditions specified by this section, if-
(1) it is non-commerical
(2) it is publicly available
(3) You have to keep the copyrigh notice in tact.
If you want to fight against free sharing of copyrighted media between archives, you better change the law first.
Yeah, and while SRAM isn't mentione in the Economist piece of the blurb on EETimes, their home page says right up front that SRAM is one of the main targets.
I hadn't seen that when I first posted so I wasn't sure. Now I'm even more interested. I mean there's little argument that programmable logic is the future of chip design and this would be a revolutionary leap in that direction.
Besides the technological implications, consider the political --ASIC make semi a paradise niche for monopolies. With this technology we'd begin to see open source hardware IP cores really take off. This of course would reflect back on the software market. Interesting times ahead, but that was true either way. This would just speed things up. And then there's the hypercompuing side. This is definitely an intriguing news blurb.
So far everybody is missing the point including the Economist article. This stuff would replace SRAM. High performance FPGAs from Xilinx and Altera are made of SRAM with refresh in the neighborhood of ten nanoseconds. This would make vast and fast FPGAs possible.
So, instead of merely replacing system RAM or storage this would replace the CPU, the memory controllers, the video card, the sound card --it would be the ultimate SoC platform.
Re:I still don't see how P2P is infringement.
on
The Law and P2P
·
· Score: 1
No, see the purpose of these three copies is as backups so that if one of them gets destroyed then you can make a copy from one of your existing copies. That's why you're supposed to use the copies to lend, so you don't have your original copy get screwed up.
But don't take my word for it, please go look for yourself. I don't have the link, but google copyright and then once you get to the Federal Code search for Fair Use. It's right there for the whole world to see. It's open source.
I still don't see how P2P is infringement.
on
The Law and P2P
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The Federal Code has several sections on Fair Use.
The first section on individual Fair Use may not be all that relevant to P2P, but the second section seems to go straight to the heart of the matter.
The second section is about Libraries and Archives. It's the Archives part that seems particularly relevant to P2P. That's what P2P is, isn't it --a distributed archive.
Moreover, the law itself specifies what it means by a library by saying that a library is a publicly accessible non-commercial media lending facility.
Libraries and Archives are allowed not one, not two, but three. Count them, three big copies of any copyrighted work. And what is the purpose of these three copies? Specifically, the purpose of these copies is to lend to other publicly accessible non-commercial archives.
So, let's compare this to P2P. A hypothetical user has two copies of a copyrighted work on CD backups and another on the hard drive. That's three copies. Hmm, so far I don't see any infringement. But what's the intent. Let's see here. It appears our hypothetical user is going to lend a copy to another publicly accessible non-commercial archive.
According to US Federal law this seems to be completely legal activity.
When you say RG-59 is good for line-level audio, can you just use a mini plug connector from a sound card directly into RG-59 with some kind of adaptor? What would that adaptor looke like. Do they make mini plug to BNC? Or do you go mini to RCA and RCA to BNC?
Can you do that directly or through an RCA/BNC adaptor or would you need to go to XLR? Does an XLR adaptor work with RG-59? But then how do you get the sound card connected?
Are you suggesting something like this would be useful? If so, then how do you get from the XLR to the sound card mini plug?
I'm pretty clueless on this, but it sounds like a way to synchronize my upstairs and downstairs amps to my sound card. I already have a spool of RG-59 laying around.
The density argument is a bunch of shit. I'm on the far north coast of Taiwan miles from anything close to a town. 1.5megDSL thirty bucks a month.
Bandwidth costs in the States because the people have decided to be satisfied with a government that suppoorts corporate welfare over human welfare.
Yes, but what does an IP mean in court?
This is why the Verizon case is going to get dragged out forever. The MPAA/RIAA want to pretend that it's a cut and dried case of the ISP can pin an IP to a specific individual, but it's not quite that simple. There are all sorts of details and exceptions. The ISP does have an IP number in a log. That much is black and white, but anything else beyond that is going to involve numerous issues. If you doubt it, look at some child pornography cases. It's not as simple as you might think. If you want a computer crime prosecution, you better be prepared to seize equipment and fight for jail time and be ready for counter suits. Child porn or big time digital theft cases often go to these extremes to make cases stick where an airtight case can be made for extended jail sentences, but I have a hard time seeing these guys pushing for jail time and seizures of equipment. That's what they need to win in court.
Then again, weed is a felony in many states. Who knows. But an IP in an ISP's log is not going to cut it.
People prefer to have their own physical copy of any media they pay cash for. If cash payment, be it for blank media or pre-recorded, is going to drive the market, that's the way it will stay.
If the assumption is that media interest can somehow force this issue then the important thing to look at is not whether or not that is possible, but to look at whether there are examples from the past that we can look at to learn from and see if that will be a profitable business model.
In this case there is a very clear example of a non-physical distribution media --advertising supported broadcast television. Looking forward then, we should ask if the advertising based business model of broadcast television is workable for next generation video over the Net. I seriously doubt that.
Despite the challenges, I have to assume that disk sales are the brightest hope for media interests. If the "talent management" side of things sucks, they can always get into making blanks. I hear the margins are awesome on volume.
However,
As you move to smaller process technology you tend to increase speed and gate counts exponentially. Moore's law and all that. But you also increase the mask costs which means FPGAs definitely are the future of IC design for economic reasons. The speed difference between ASIC and FPGA will become much less of a factor than the overall price difference of brining a product to market as we move into the 90nm and lower level.
Not only does an FPGA allow you to use one mask to create thousands of diverse products, the design of an FPGA mask itself is simpler than a comparably sized, for example CPU ASIC. KISS and cost control are certainly going to be the rules from here on out.
Let's make the global standard for patents five years non-extendable and let's put copyrights around ten years.
Oh, and how about penlties for obfuscatd patent applications since the goal is to increase the knowledge in the public domain. That is the goal, right?
Yeah, side scan was what they used to pick up Laci Peterson's body at the bottom of SF Bay. Pretty trippy stuff.
For a lot more on the project that was vaguely decribed in the link google Guy Pignolet. There's tons of background on this and it has been in the planning for years.
This can already be done quite easily with regular power lines without even touching them. You can tap significant amounts of power from a high voltage transmission line even from yards away. The problem is not technical, it's legal and it's not too tough for the power utilities to find you doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Like so much of the so-called philosophy about The Matrix this seems fundamentally flawed.
It seems questionable in the extreme that seconds are a particularly significant measure of a person's life.
Breaking it down to nanoseconds or picoseconds doesn't fix the underlying issue of how we can say with certainty that human life is a series of discreet units similar to an animation.
Besides, you don't need The Martix to suggest that life is an illusion. You can show the same thing in a much more profound way using language theory.
I can't believe so many people are so missing the point.
I personally have, and no others who have their own class C's that are unrouteable because they applied for them personally back in the early eighties before the Net went corporate.
They just sit there unused and the reason is very simple --money. In order to route to those addresses you need to pay off the big money hustlas. Until they're gone, the squeeze is on.
And that's why we don't use IPv6. It's quite simple and the bottom line is cash dollars in the IP bubble economy.
My reading of US copyright law indicates that non-commercial, publicly accessible archives are allowed to make copies of copyrighted media for distribution to other such archives. This is in the first chapter under the fair use sub-section 107.
Do you think that BitTorrent fits the definition of a publicly accessible and non-commercial media archive?
If this isn't just a joke, I assume you're probably still on your first generation design because you say you used CDRs. I really did this, but before I started I set several different types of CDs and CDRs out in the sun to see how they would react. I found that CDRs were relatively unstable and delaminated relatively early compared to pressed CDRs. In addition, I noticed that they were much less reflective, at least when it came to visible light. This was easy to test. Just set them in the sun and angle them onto a wall and see which ones produced brighter reflections. The CDRs, both colored and silver, were very weak and diffuse compared to pressed CDs. CDRs have more of a prismatic effect than a mirror effect. That's cool, but it's not good for concentration.
I started off with a dual axis three meter sunflower made out of a hand woven geodesic wire mesh which looked cool, but it turned out to be way too flimsy. It held its own shape fine but the tracking was a bitch even in a very slight breeze and it got totally thrashed when the first good wind came. It was a total success as an art project but it wasn't practical. Only a few bucks in materials though and it produced scarry amounts of heat at the focal point for the short time it was functional.
So I switched to a much smaller linear trough design that worked for almost nine months before the CDs became thoroughly delaminated.
At that point I realized that glass mirrors really weren't that expensive when you took into account the labor of having to replace all those demalinated CDs. It's fun the first time, but when it becomes a regular chore it sucks and it can be discouraging which isn't good because concentrated solar really works.
I never got to the point where I could try a heat engine, but it definitely heated up water. Sandia's Sunlab has some awesome pics of commercial projects that got me interested and then there's the ever popular idea of the scroll compressor run backwards. Any news on that one?
And to go along with that one, what about the countries besides the US who don't belong to intellectual property treaties with the US and who have copyright laws that are still thirty or fifty years.
Since the Net is borderless, how can anybody expect to enforce American copyright overseas? And if it's not enforced overseas, how do we stop Americans from accessing overseas addresses?
I think PBS and NPR have done some great content and are still valuable, but I have to agree to an extent that the public airwaves stuff is crap when NPR won't let you download MP3s and PBS doesn't offer digital time shifting formats either. They have no right to call themselves public in the digital age with their restrictive polices. They're no better than any other corporate network.
In the Watergate era they were absolutely essential as an alternative media both polticially and in the society at large with PBS being the first to show nudity on American broadcast television and the Pacifica network's role in shaping obscenity law for broadcast media.
But the Net has made them somewhat irrelevant. This topic being a good case in point. They're using the net as a source and yet we won't be able to download the product. NPR in particular is very unfriendly to the net and Linux in particular. NPR only suported Linux audio by accident when Real Inc. made a Linux player. Prior to that, they took a rather cavalier attitude about if you don't use Microsoft, you're not a part of the community.
I think what you have to look at is the media context in which the prices are displayed.
It's quite true that many stores will try to prevent you from making recordings of any kinds on their physical premises. I've been reprimanded by store managers many times for taking photos in the store. But their right to prevent me from creating media on their premises is based on their property rights, not any some legally backed authority to censror the media.
The web is a totally different story. I use web scrapers all the time and a site that doesn't like it can kindly take its ass off the web. Once you place material on the web, it is published. If you don't want to publish your prices, you don't have to. That's like publishing a book and complaining the readers read it too fast.
The people who compain about such things are the idiots who create unworkable business plans based on their own assumptions about how people are going to use the resource. This is an interesting issue with news media that want to sell access to their archives. There's no way they can both publish to the web and prevent me from caching old copies. If that's the business plan then web publishing is an inappropriate business decision and guess who should pay for bad business decisions: the consumer, or the fool who pursued an ignorant business plan?
Yeah, and a PLD wireless transciever to reach those higher frequencies would be even more fun.
But I think your casual dismissal of the relevance of open source is misguided. In a closed source environment where a single vendor controls vast swaths of the market, there's little incentive to innovate in disruptive ways. This is a disruptive technology as it would potentially make many incompatible pieces of equipment irrelevant. While it could technically have been done in any language I would not say that open source is irrelevant to this project.
Thanks, and feel free to spread the word. I think this is an extremely important point with particular bearing on the P2P issue since the core use of P2P is as a distributed archival system. If this is true, then the law already protects it in wording that preceeds the Betamax decision.
The archive issue is also important for other reasons as well. People like Ted Turner use the argument that archives are expensive to maintain so they're doing the public a service by keeping the material in a private archive. If P2P clearly identifies itself as a distributed archive technology then these policies will have to be restated to reflect the reality which is that the motive is to restrict fair use provisions of federal copyright law. This kind of behavior should be revealed for what it is --selling desks on the first day of class. Nobody owns the media under federal law.
I feel that the majority of the people screaming loudest and casting about derogatory terms like piracy and thievery are those who were duped the hardest by the CD scam. I know people like this. They would spend like a third of their pay check month in and month out over the years stocking up on thousands of CDs so they could have the ultimate media collection. These folks had social problems from the start and it's not surprising that they're frothing at the mouth now. But that doesn't make them right.
Again though, do spread the word. This is something I have heard very little of although I've seen a lot of reference to the Betamax decision. Betamax is also relevant here, but I think the public non-commercial archive issue is much more appropriate and can be demonstrated in many ways from various angles.
Well the easy way to clarify this is for you to simply read the law. It's not too difficult. You're totally off the mark here because the passage I quoted which is the second heading under fair use in the first chapter of federal copyright law that comes right after personal fair use is about copies made for lending to other archives. You're talking about a parton borrowing a book from a library. These are two separate issues under the law as you will see when you go read it yourself as I'm sure you'll do as a responsible American.
If you want to argue that I'm misreading the text, your best bet is to argue the definition of an archive. However, in my research so far the only solid definitions that have been given with regards to copyright law and fair use are that it is non-commercial collection of text and electronic media that is open to the public. I doubt you will find a more restrictive definition because the nature of archives makes it difficult to create a restrictive definition, but if you find something, please post it.
Nice, but the law itself makes it even clearer. Libraries and archives can make and lend compies and they must be free and publicly available. P2P is an archive.
Read 'em and weep. This is from www.loc.gov/copyright Chapter 1. I abridged the subsections for brevity, but go look for yourself if you're suspicious, or even if you're not. Sharing is a right guaranteed by federal law.
± 108. Limitations on exclusive rights: Reproduction by libraries and archives39
(a) Except as otherwise provided in this title and notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement of copyright for a library or archives, or any of its employees acting within the scope of their employment, to reproduce no more than one copy or phonorecord of a work, except as provided in subsections (b) and (c), or to distribute such copy or phonorecord, under the conditions specified by this section, if-
(1) it is non-commerical
(2) it is publicly available
(3) You have to keep the copyrigh notice in tact.
If you want to fight against free sharing of copyrighted media between archives, you better change the law first.
Yeah, and while SRAM isn't mentione in the Economist piece of the blurb on EETimes, their home page says right up front that SRAM is one of the main targets.
I hadn't seen that when I first posted so I wasn't sure. Now I'm even more interested. I mean there's little argument that programmable logic is the future of chip design and this would be a revolutionary leap in that direction.
Besides the technological implications, consider the political --ASIC make semi a paradise niche for monopolies. With this technology we'd begin to see open source hardware IP cores really take off. This of course would reflect back on the software market. Interesting times ahead, but that was true either way. This would just speed things up. And then there's the hypercompuing side. This is definitely an intriguing news blurb.
So far everybody is missing the point including the Economist article. This stuff would replace SRAM. High performance FPGAs from Xilinx and Altera are made of SRAM with refresh in the neighborhood of ten nanoseconds. This would make vast and fast FPGAs possible.
So, instead of merely replacing system RAM or storage this would replace the CPU, the memory controllers, the video card, the sound card --it would be the ultimate SoC platform.
No, see the purpose of these three copies is as backups so that if one of them gets destroyed then you can make a copy from one of your existing copies. That's why you're supposed to use the copies to lend, so you don't have your original copy get screwed up.
But don't take my word for it, please go look for yourself. I don't have the link, but google copyright and then once you get to the Federal Code search for Fair Use. It's right there for the whole world to see. It's open source.
The Federal Code has several sections on Fair Use.
The first section on individual Fair Use may not be all that relevant to P2P, but the second section seems to go straight to the heart of the matter.
The second section is about Libraries and Archives. It's the Archives part that seems particularly relevant to P2P. That's what P2P is, isn't it --a distributed archive.
Moreover, the law itself specifies what it means by a library by saying that a library is a publicly accessible non-commercial media lending facility.
Libraries and Archives are allowed not one, not two, but three. Count them, three big copies of any copyrighted work. And what is the purpose of these three copies? Specifically, the purpose of these copies is to lend to other publicly accessible non-commercial archives.
So, let's compare this to P2P. A hypothetical user has two copies of a copyrighted work on CD backups and another on the hard drive. That's three copies. Hmm, so far I don't see any infringement. But what's the intent. Let's see here. It appears our hypothetical user is going to lend a copy to another publicly accessible non-commercial archive.
According to US Federal law this seems to be completely legal activity.
Can you do that directly or through an RCA/BNC adaptor or would you need to go to XLR? Does an XLR adaptor work with RG-59? But then how do you get the sound card connected?
Are you suggesting something like this would be useful? If so, then how do you get from the XLR to the sound card mini plug?
I'm pretty clueless on this, but it sounds like a way to synchronize my upstairs and downstairs amps to my sound card. I already have a spool of RG-59 laying around.
The density argument is a bunch of shit. I'm on the far north coast of Taiwan miles from anything close to a town. 1.5megDSL thirty bucks a month.
Bandwidth costs in the States because the people have decided to be satisfied with a government that suppoorts corporate welfare over human welfare.
Yes, but what does an IP mean in court?
This is why the Verizon case is going to get dragged out forever. The MPAA/RIAA want to pretend that it's a cut and dried case of the ISP can pin an IP to a specific individual, but it's not quite that simple. There are all sorts of details and exceptions. The ISP does have an IP number in a log. That much is black and white, but anything else beyond that is going to involve numerous issues. If you doubt it, look at some child pornography cases. It's not as simple as you might think. If you want a computer crime prosecution, you better be prepared to seize equipment and fight for jail time and be ready for counter suits. Child porn or big time digital theft cases often go to these extremes to make cases stick where an airtight case can be made for extended jail sentences, but I have a hard time seeing these guys pushing for jail time and seizures of equipment. That's what they need to win in court.
Then again, weed is a felony in many states. Who knows. But an IP in an ISP's log is not going to cut it.
People prefer to have their own physical copy of any media they pay cash for. If cash payment, be it for blank media or pre-recorded, is going to drive the market, that's the way it will stay.
If the assumption is that media interest can somehow force this issue then the important thing to look at is not whether or not that is possible, but to look at whether there are examples from the past that we can look at to learn from and see if that will be a profitable business model.
In this case there is a very clear example of a non-physical distribution media --advertising supported broadcast television. Looking forward then, we should ask if the advertising based business model of broadcast television is workable for next generation video over the Net. I seriously doubt that.
Despite the challenges, I have to assume that disk sales are the brightest hope for media interests. If the "talent management" side of things sucks, they can always get into making blanks. I hear the margins are awesome on volume.
However,
As you move to smaller process technology you tend to increase speed and gate counts exponentially. Moore's law and all that. But you also increase the mask costs which means FPGAs definitely are the future of IC design for economic reasons. The speed difference between ASIC and FPGA will become much less of a factor than the overall price difference of brining a product to market as we move into the 90nm and lower level.
Not only does an FPGA allow you to use one mask to create thousands of diverse products, the design of an FPGA mask itself is simpler than a comparably sized, for example CPU ASIC. KISS and cost control are certainly going to be the rules from here on out.
But aren't FPGA's essentially SRAM? Have you ever looked at Xilinx or Altera's patents?
Let's make the global standard for patents five years non-extendable and let's put copyrights around ten years.
Oh, and how about penlties for obfuscatd patent applications since the goal is to increase the knowledge in the public domain. That is the goal, right?
Yeah, side scan was what they used to pick up Laci Peterson's body at the bottom of SF Bay. Pretty trippy stuff.
For a lot more on the project that was vaguely decribed in the link google Guy Pignolet. There's tons of background on this and it has been in the planning for years.
This can already be done quite easily with regular power lines without even touching them. You can tap significant amounts of power from a high voltage transmission line even from yards away. The problem is not technical, it's legal and it's not too tough for the power utilities to find you doing it.
The Net rather. I meant the Net.