> (i.e. easy enough for 22 million AOL users),
I use one of these [AIB Visa using something called O-Card which I presume was developed by Visa]. Pathetically simple - launch it and it sits as a Task bar icon - when you want to pay something you click it, up pops a dialog (that looks like a credit card in case you are really dumb) Click pay now - a simple dialog asks for the credit limit - then you authenticate with a decent password - and it throws up a silly picture of a credit card so even a real dingbat can figure out what to type into the web page.
Personally I never trusted any online vendor with my credit details - and it's not just hackers I don't trust it's the vendors themselves. With this I don't give a damn - it's a one shot limited liability item. Only drawback I've had is using it for airline bookings where they require you to present the card later in order to pick up the tickets. No can do as there is no "card" as such.
You have a point but I don't think it is particularly serious - many mp3's are of pretty low quality anyway and the additional quality loss is a couple of orders of magnitude lower than an audio to audio copy. You're intercepting the digital output of your mp3 player [ie the signal it sends to the audio hardware] not the final audio.
It's true that redistributing via Napster will keep adding that error back in but the point is that if you get a supposedly "secured" digital media file you can unsecure it as easily as you can play it.
Can't see how anyone thinks they can enforce digital rights management on the current hardware that is out there and that we all have.
I'm sure there's a freeware equivalent that I don't know about but High Criteria's Total Recorder [http://www.highcriteria.com/products.htm
] allows you to convert any audio stream into plain vanilla wav [or directly to mp3] by quite simply intercepting the direct audio data feed to the sound hardware.
Until the RIAA plug that hole it will be very hard to prevent people from unlocking any secured digital media format, and IMO probably impossible especialyl if someone produces an Open Source equivalent. And I can't see how those of us that count can be forced to hand over the hardware we currently have that will always allow us to do that.
Napster II will be a complete joke if they try this - we'll all be rolling about in the aisles in hysterics.
Possibly - I've seen something similar on Amazon - just looking at the copy that I have [NEL] it certainly says First Published in Great Britain in 1962 by New English Library however just under that it says Copyright 1982 by Robert A. Heinlein.
Odd.
It's also one of my favourites.
Yep - particularly effective description of what happens when tens of thousands of kilometres of a structure comes crashing down to earth oops mars.
The article fails to mention Robert A. Heinlein - in at least one of his books [Friday which my copy says was first published in the UK in 1962] his main character regularly uses what he calls a Beanstalk to get too and from L-5 to a base station in Kenya. The story also references a disaster at another Beanstalk in Quito - so the many of the concepts were well formed in fiction before either the Pravda or Science articles put some theory into them.
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> (i.e. easy enough for 22 million AOL users), I use one of these [AIB Visa using something called O-Card which I presume was developed by Visa]. Pathetically simple - launch it and it sits as a Task bar icon - when you want to pay something you click it, up pops a dialog (that looks like a credit card in case you are really dumb) Click pay now - a simple dialog asks for the credit limit - then you authenticate with a decent password - and it throws up a silly picture of a credit card so even a real dingbat can figure out what to type into the web page.
Personally I never trusted any online vendor with my credit details - and it's not just hackers I don't trust it's the vendors themselves. With this I don't give a damn - it's a one shot limited liability item. Only drawback I've had is using it for airline bookings where they require you to present the card later in order to pick up the tickets. No can do as there is no "card" as such.
You have a point but I don't think it is particularly serious - many mp3's are of pretty low quality anyway and the additional quality loss is a couple of orders of magnitude lower than an audio to audio copy. You're intercepting the digital output of your mp3 player [ie the signal it sends to the audio hardware] not the final audio. It's true that redistributing via Napster will keep adding that error back in but the point is that if you get a supposedly "secured" digital media file you can unsecure it as easily as you can play it.
Can't see how anyone thinks they can enforce digital rights management on the current hardware that is out there and that we all have.
I'm sure there's a freeware equivalent that I don't know about but High Criteria's Total Recorder [http://www.highcriteria.com/products.htm ] allows you to convert any audio stream into plain vanilla wav [or directly to mp3] by quite simply intercepting the direct audio data feed to the sound hardware.
Until the RIAA plug that hole it will be very hard to prevent people from unlocking any secured digital media format, and IMO probably impossible especialyl if someone produces an Open Source equivalent. And I can't see how those of us that count can be forced to hand over the hardware we currently have that will always allow us to do that.
Napster II will be a complete joke if they try this - we'll all be rolling about in the aisles in hysterics.
Possibly - I've seen something similar on Amazon - just looking at the copy that I have [NEL] it certainly says First Published in Great Britain in 1962 by New English Library however just under that it says Copyright 1982 by Robert A. Heinlein. Odd. It's also one of my favourites.
Yep - particularly effective description of what happens when tens of thousands of kilometres of a structure comes crashing down to earth oops mars. The article fails to mention Robert A. Heinlein - in at least one of his books [Friday which my copy says was first published in the UK in 1962] his main character regularly uses what he calls a Beanstalk to get too and from L-5 to a base station in Kenya. The story also references a disaster at another Beanstalk in Quito - so the many of the concepts were well formed in fiction before either the Pravda or Science articles put some theory into them.