I don't know if any other of you took notice of this line:
They'll just use the illegal P2P software that gives them access to everything instead.
Apparently the brainwashing to convince people that P2P software is illegal is spreading, forgetting that what is illegal is the action of copying without authorization, not the existence of P2P software....
The loss of potential profits is a serious problem,
DAMMIT DAMMIT I have lost my lottery ticket, I have lost 1 MILLION EUROS!!!
..wait..
What do you mean with "you should check first if it was the winning one"?
(Potential is exactly that, potential. What next? Suing your employer because he didn't fire you, depriving you of the possibilility of getting a better job?)
If you speak more than one language, you don't simply think in "words". There's ideas, images, sounds, smells, and other harder to describe concepts. The process of translating is not a look-up process ("this word means that word", etc.).
When studying foreing languages, I have seen that I have 3 "stages" of knowledge.
1- low. Speaking (or translation) is strictly word-by-word transfer from my main language, and works badly because many of the needed words in the new language are not known.
2- medium. Speaking/translation is mostly word-by-word, except for some well-know phrases (usually the expressions that don't match well between the two languages). It works slowly because translating is a look-up process, but it's reliable, i.e. unless you hit an unknown word you can easily map one word onto the other.
3- high. Speaking is done direct from ideas to words, I don't pass anymore from my main language. Translation becomes hard, since the look-up approach is lost and now it's necessary to "switch context" between one language and the other and see what concept is associated to which word in the two cases. The translation ends up being very non-literal, since phrases are translated in a single shot. Languages may be mixed up (intentionally) when a word in one language is more effective at describing one idea than any in the other language.
Hmm, on my 300MHz/256MB machine (my 1.5 GHz Athlon is in the mail;) Galeon running under IceWM absolutely crawls,
False. I'm on a P233 with 128Megs. Windowmaker. I always use galeon and it's fine (except for rendering huge pages). Your "mistake" is creating new windows: Galeon has tabs, which work MUCH better than windows (faster, don't clutter the desktop as much). Opening new windows stresses a lot more stuff than necessary....
It's a very difficult problem to model. It involves two pendulums (both of which, despite what many of your freshmen physics professors told you, are nonlinear oscillators), and a coupling mass.
I'm not familiar with this particular system, but are you sure you need to consider nonlinearities to obtain the synchronization? Isn't some k(x1-x2) enough to deal with it? I don't have the time now to hack together a perl script to simulate the system, I'll try later...
It seems to me that it's very much the same thing. In both cases you have oscillators with periods very similar to each other linked by very weak coupling. The interesting things are that this coupling, even if it's very weak, can influence the system and bring up synchronization and that depending on what's up you can have locking on an in-phase state or an anti-phase state. The same kind of things happens in a lot of other systems, like for example the coupled lasers I have here.... (in-phase and anti-phase in this case appear depending on the sign of the coupling coefficient).
Moral of the story: If you live in the UK, don't bother encrypting either. They'll just get their grubby hands on it if they want to.
But the advantage is that they have to come and ask you to decrypt. This way you KNOW that someone "intercepted" your data and read it. It's like an envelope: it's not like nobody can open it, but you get to see if it has been opened or not.
Personally, I have nothing to hide, and if police wants me to open up my data I've nothing against it, provided it works both ways, i.e. I want to know WHY they are reading my data and who will access it. This way, if it's "confidential" stuff (like my CC number) I know who to sue if anything goes wrong.
I got VERY bored of.doc attachments long ago. After polite answers, with basically no effect, sending back weird formats, again with small effect, I've now found an optimal solution.
1- the document is critical for me: I open with StarOffice and send a reply saying that due to some strange microsoft incompatibilities (dur to my word being old, probably) something was wrong, but I was able to read the text. Why not send it as text in the first place and save the trouble?
2- the document is non-critical. I hit 'd' and plainly delete the mail. I may even NOT read the mail body. When asked I look puzzled and reply that I never got the message, adding something misty about "word attachment with virus which may get deleted automatically by some mailservers".
It still doesn't work, but at least it's fun:)
But from an average user's perspective, OS X is sweet! The interface is very nice - and it is so stable. The user made that very comment "Why hasn't it crashed on me?" He used to have crashes all the time. Now he has the other Mac users asking if they can upgrade anytime soon.
Hehe, sounds like my wife. After an upgrade of her "old" B&W G3 we decided to buy and install OSX. She spent basically one day and night playing with it (iMovies - nice app, plugged the camera via firewire and it worked immediately -, iTunes, etc.). And at the end she told me with surprise "I know it'll sound strange for a linux user to hear this, but I used it for 1 day!! And it NEVER crashed! It never happened before with 9!!".
BTW the system is really good. The finder is unfamiliar at the beginning, and the tons of special effects make the interface dog slow (I'm the kind of person running windowmaker on at Athlon 800 because I find that all the E/KDE stuff crawls...), but being able to open a terminal, use emacs/gcc/ssh/etc. make you feel at home even if you come from the unix world.
We had some installation problems: in the upgrade the HD was replaced with a new (blank) one, and it was only after putting it in that we found that the MacOS9 given with X requires a firmware upgrade to be installed correctly (why X does not require it is beyond me). The upgrade program is on the installation CD, but it requires booting from a writable device (no booting from the CD), so we were forced to install MacOS8, upgrade the firmware, reformat the disk and install 9+X.
I've not looked into the configuration-through-the-command-line issues, for what was needed (setting up the eth card for the local network) the graphics configuration tools were fine.
The idea of requiring an administrator password to make changes is nice, since it provides a protection which is missing in the old MacOS as in the Win9x world, and which ensures that no stupid mistake will screw up the system.
Package installation is a vey very nice: drag the file with the "box" icon to your disk and it's done.
I've not yet been able to burn a CD in any format. I've slipped in a blank CD, and it asks me to initialize it, but even with admin provilege there's no way I can partition/format/??? it with the disk utility. Using an image passes through the disk copy utility which looks like a fairly ultimate image management program, but it refused to create an iso9660 image and crashed on me after a short time. I just downloaded the latest system update and I'll see if it fixes the issues.....
Overall, it's worth just for the stress reduction of having my wife scream when the system locked hard with all her data lost in never-never land:)
No, it's just completely -1 offtopic. There are lots of threads about licensing where it may have a place (ok, it's written to sound like trolling, so it may end up moderated accordingly), but here it's just out of place.
Energy Department scientists contend those issues either have been resolved or can be dealt with as a final design for the facility goes through the licensing process.
I don't understand: if there still are issues which are not resolved, how can the decision to put the dump there be taken? What if the issues CANNOT be dealt with during the final phase? Does anyone believe that they will they be able to admit and back out?
I'm not surprised that the local politicians (and I suppose also the population) are NOT happy about it....
Also, in the post-9/11 world it'll be much harder to keep en eye on what's happening as "for security reasons" lots of stuff has been pulled from the Internet. For example, in France we have a recycling site at La Hague which used to give access to many webcams inside the installation (the new director's policy was "absolute transparency" to reassure citizens), but now they are offline....
Re:Don't think we haven't noticed or cared!
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 2
Reminds me why I will never work with Artificial Intelligence. Even assuming something can be made, the use of it will guarantee that it spends all of its time (brain cycles?) to find a way to eliminate all humans....[1]
But even more scary is that suppose it works: where will it be applied first of all? It'll be placed inside a WEAPON. What a good idea:)
[1] After all what would you do to people who plan to send you to death in some meaningless place or threaten to switch you off? It'll also be easy, since human brain runs at 14Hz(?) while his/her/its may run 10^8 times faster....
A list of Error 404 - file not found links....
I'm still wondering if this is a simple error or a very funny joke about the endless number of licenses....:)
Suppose companies start distributing video using the CPTWG encoder (whatever they might call it) to mark it as nondistributable. What's to keep folk from sending the video output to a DV device, then reading it back and re-encoding it to whatever 'open' format they choose? This isn't the easiest way to accomplish it, I'm sure, but if media can be played, can't it be re-recorded and converted?
The only workable solution I can see is not very workable at all. You need to watermark ALL the "copyrighted" stuff and make sure that players only play it when it's coming from "legitimate media" (CPRM anyone?). Tricks like disc regions unwritable by consumer-level recorders may work.
Now, if you rip and reencode the watermark is present, but since your copy is (of course) not on legitimate media the player will refuse to play it.
Now, this is all nice and wonderful, except for a VERY MINOR problem: i.e. nobody says that you should use the compression algorithm supported by the players. If I rip to some random video format and then use some random computer program to play it, the "certified" video player never comes into play, so no copy control is possible.
This too has solutions, of course, like embedding copy control systems into the output device (= monitor). By using a crypto handshake between all the devices, from disc reader to monitor, it can be the monitor itself which refuses to display the watermarked data. Since forging the crypto handshake can be extremely hard, you would be forced to degrade the video quality until the watermark is lost, losing the advantage of digital copies.
Now, technologically this is probably feasible and would be very hard to defeat. Flat screen producers would very much like to be able to include electronics on the screen itself, since connecting the matrix to the control electronics is a pain, and this would make the hardware virtually unbreakable. What I think the REAL problem is, is that economically the growth of the last years has been brought by the amount of free stuff circulating. I cannot prove this, but I think, for example, that the price of HD went down because of Napster/warez/broadband. By locking all the stuff down at hardware level you kill the incentive to buy new hardware, since: 1- people don't need it, 2- the new hardware is as locked down at the old, so there's no added benefit in upgrading (while graphics cards still have room for improvement, the current CPUs are already way too fast for "end-user" use, the RAM very cheap, disk space almost free, audio as good as it's needed.... and there isn't much else in the general "multimedia" PC....). Whatever company follow this strategy will basically gut itself in face of the "non-compliant" ones which provide added value in terms of less control.
You are perfectly right when you say:
It seems to me that whenever the powers-that-wanna-be try to establish total control of digital media, they lose whatever control or influence they already had. Why not redirect efforts toward better fair-use policies, reasonable licensing schemes, and accept that somebody will copy your work no matter what you do?
Video rental stores seem to live quite well, and a "global renting store" via internet downloads would probably work very well. The problem is that it would be forced to apply prices which people find reasonable, which would undercut the massive profits of the content indistry (this is why they are fighting this at full steam). To give an idea of a "reasonable price" consider the cost of storing it on HD (including classification/retrieval, etc.), of download bandwidth and (this last is a negative value) the nuisance of waiting for the download (if you already have it on your HD you don't have to wait). People now hoards warez/music for the fear that the only other way to get it will be paying lots of money (both now or in the future), but would they really fill up gigs and gigs of HD and CD if the knew that for $X ot $Y/month you can just redownload it when you need?
Overall, I think that the outcome is inevitable, my only fear is the "collateral damage" which will result while the fighting continues....
Very good point. In all cases the individual maximizes the function "individual gain" playing with all the variables it can access. If punishment is one of those and it plays a role it'll get used as well.
I know you'll never believe this coming from an anti-DMCA type like me, but I kinda like these news. The reason is this: I think that the RIAA/MPAA/whatever are preparing themselves for a VERY harsh wake-up when they find out that Microsoft cares zero-nilch-nada-nothing about their interests. Microsoft's aim is market dominance and experience shows that it can be obtained much more readily by massive availability of stuff and not massive control. I predict that (obviously) the WMP formats will be cracked (didn't it already happen?) and Microsoft will very gladly look the other way while tons of pirated stuff get exchanged in WMP format only playable on Windows or Microsoft-licensed players. They'll invest 5% of the huge profits they make in PR towards the aforementioned RIMPAA, who will actually learn that Microsoft are the very best in security/content protection and whatever other solution will be worse.
Global result: for the price of a windows license and some gigs of disk the users get unlimited access to (pirated) content. Users are happy. Microsoft is happy. RIAA/MPAA are screwed.
It'll be fun to watch.....
I like the answer on lowendmac. Not the article, but the statistics. Beside that, could it be that we're witnessing the same "netscape effect" of the web? The article says that lots of web developers use those statistics to build sites. Translation: they only target IE. I can believe this, since I use galeon and I often have quirks in commercial sites. Now, if your site works well only with IE I'm not surprised that 98% of the visitors use IE.... Just like netscape-enhanced sites used to justify their attitude by saying that "90%+ of the visitors use netscape"....
(Note: I use Windows == IE. I don't know the statistics of Ns/Mozilla/Opera vs IE on windows, am I guessing right that they are a tiny %?).
I probably sound pollyannish saying that when I pay for something, I want to use it how I see fit. I know all the college kids are going to start whining that I should use Linux instead, but I don't like Linux, as much as I've tried, so I guess I just have to take whatever crap the corps feed me.
Don't you think that just the fact that basically the ONLY possible answer is "use Linux" (or any other free-software OS system) is a very good indicator of how bad the situation is?
I'm not talking about Microsoft monopoly, but of a general trend of the market (as it was already pointed out by someone else) to force updates, or, better, to convert sale into subscription. We see it more in the software market because the lifecycle is much shorter (both for technical - fast evolution - and economical - mantaining current profits - reasons), but it happens also in other markets.
I mean, it's NATURAL that with the advance of technology old things become obsolete, but it's a bad sign when, as you point out, the whole thing becomes just a strategy to "maximize profit".
If the software market is the one where it's most visible, it's somewhat counter-balanced by the free software community. The same approach does not work as well for "real" objects (even if e.g. in the case of old cars you have clubs of fans who exchange parts/experience to mantain them).
You'll forgive me then if the only answer I can provide is to start whining that you should use linux:) (I do and I like it.....) (BTW the very same happens with linux, just look at the amount of updates which you must apply because otherwise things break, but at least you don't have to pay for them....).
Not a troll but a real question... Does the porn industry already have established digital characters like this?
I remember once when I was playing a mud and one of the players said he was looking for models to set up a porn site. I said to him: why don't you try something new and ray-trace them and create a new type of porn? He answered that the thing was not original at all and several sites of that type already existed. And this was some 6 years ago.... I guess that if you're willing to waste some time looking around you can find something.
The kernel patch you refer to is not outdated. There just is no reason to release new versions. Here's how you patch your kernel with the international patch.
Actually, I remember reading (mailing list? cryptoapi doc? newsgroup?) that the patch-int should NOT be used, because the implementation of several cyphers (twofish comes to mind) is broken.
As I already wrote in another post, I didn't do extensive testing to compare patch-int and cryptoapi, but I *did* have lost data with patch-int: some files got garbled beyond repair (to quantify, I'd say less than 1% of them). I was using twofish.
Now I'm using cryptoapi, and I didn't have any trouble (at least not yet).
Another point: you may have troubles with losetup/mount, depending on the distribution you use. In that case, download util-linux from the kernel site, apply the patches and recompile. I keep two separate copies (called losetup-crypto and (u)mount-crypto) of the utilities.
I don't think I agree with the the suggestion about reiserfs. ReiserFS has no trouble with fsck simply because it doesn't do fsck... I'd suggest use whatever you want but disable auto-checking or, even better, modify the startup scripts to make sure that the passphrase is good (just try to mount the fs) before attempting a fsck.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if any other of you took notice of this line:
They'll just use the illegal P2P software that gives them access to everything instead.
Apparently the brainwashing to convince people that P2P software is illegal is spreading, forgetting that what is illegal is the action of copying without authorization, not the existence of P2P software....
The loss of potential profits is a serious problem,
DAMMIT DAMMIT I have lost my lottery ticket, I have lost 1 MILLION EUROS!!!
..wait..
What do you mean with "you should check first if it was the winning one"?
(Potential is exactly that, potential. What next? Suing your employer because he didn't fire you, depriving you of the possibilility of getting a better job?)
If you speak more than one language, you don't simply think in "words". There's ideas, images, sounds, smells, and other harder to describe concepts. The process of translating is not a look-up process ("this word means that word", etc.).
When studying foreing languages, I have seen that I have 3 "stages" of knowledge.
1- low. Speaking (or translation) is strictly word-by-word transfer from my main language, and works badly because many of the needed words in the new language are not known.
2- medium. Speaking/translation is mostly word-by-word, except for some well-know phrases (usually the expressions that don't match well between the two languages). It works slowly because translating is a look-up process, but it's reliable, i.e. unless you hit an unknown word you can easily map one word onto the other.
3- high. Speaking is done direct from ideas to words, I don't pass anymore from my main language. Translation becomes hard, since the look-up approach is lost and now it's necessary to "switch context" between one language and the other and see what concept is associated to which word in the two cases. The translation ends up being very non-literal, since phrases are translated in a single shot. Languages may be mixed up (intentionally) when a word in one language is more effective at describing one idea than any in the other language.
The default Web browser after the base installation is Mozilla 9.7.
:)
Ok, now we know that this review was leaked from the future.
Far future.
EXTREMELY far future, I'd say
Hmm, on my 300MHz/256MB machine (my 1.5 GHz Athlon is in the mail ;) Galeon running under IceWM absolutely crawls,
False. I'm on a P233 with 128Megs. Windowmaker.
I always use galeon and it's fine (except for rendering huge pages). Your "mistake" is creating new windows: Galeon has tabs, which work MUCH better than windows (faster, don't clutter the desktop as much). Opening new windows stresses a lot more stuff than necessary....
What's on the web site pointed by the article?
:)
All I get in galeon is a counter in the top left corner and a background image....
(or I must guess that the EM pulse I saw on my oscilloscope is their website exploding?
It's a very difficult problem to model. It involves two pendulums (both of which, despite what many of your freshmen physics professors told you, are nonlinear oscillators), and a coupling mass.
I'm not familiar with this particular system, but are you sure you need to consider nonlinearities to obtain the synchronization? Isn't some k(x1-x2) enough to deal with it?
I don't have the time now to hack together a perl script to simulate the system, I'll try later...
That has nothing to do with pendulums.
It seems to me that it's very much the same thing. In both cases you have oscillators with periods very similar to each other linked by very weak coupling.
The interesting things are that this coupling, even if it's very weak, can influence the system and bring up synchronization and that depending on what's up you can have locking on an in-phase state or an anti-phase state.
The same kind of things happens in a lot of other systems, like for example the coupled lasers I have here.... (in-phase and anti-phase in this case appear depending on the sign of the coupling coefficient).
But the advantage is that they have to come and ask you to decrypt. This way you KNOW that someone "intercepted" your data and read it. It's like an envelope: it's not like nobody can open it, but you get to see if it has been opened or not.
Personally, I have nothing to hide, and if police wants me to open up my data I've nothing against it, provided it works both ways, i.e. I want to know WHY they are reading my data and who will access it. This way, if it's "confidential" stuff (like my CC number) I know who to sue if anything goes wrong.
The correct name of the distribution should be "Sourceror GNU Linux"
I wish I still were as "civilized" as you guys...
.doc attachments long ago. After polite answers, with basically no effect, sending back weird formats, again with small effect, I've now found an optimal solution.
:)
I got VERY bored of
1- the document is critical for me: I open with StarOffice and send a reply saying that due to some strange microsoft incompatibilities (dur to my word being old, probably) something was wrong, but I was able to read the text. Why not send it as text in the first place and save the trouble?
2- the document is non-critical. I hit 'd' and plainly delete the mail. I may even NOT read the mail body. When asked I look puzzled and reply that I never got the message, adding something misty about "word attachment with virus which may get deleted automatically by some mailservers".
It still doesn't work, but at least it's fun
But from an average user's perspective, OS X is sweet! The interface is very nice - and it is so stable. The user made that very comment "Why hasn't it crashed on me?" He used to have crashes all the time. Now he has the other Mac users asking if they can upgrade anytime soon.
:)
Hehe, sounds like my wife. After an upgrade of her "old" B&W G3 we decided to buy and install OSX. She spent basically one day and night playing with it (iMovies - nice app, plugged the camera via firewire and it worked immediately -, iTunes, etc.). And at the end she told me with surprise "I know it'll sound strange for a linux user to hear this, but I used it for 1 day!! And it NEVER crashed! It never happened before with 9!!".
BTW the system is really good. The finder is unfamiliar at the beginning, and the tons of special effects make the interface dog slow (I'm the kind of person running windowmaker on at Athlon 800 because I find that all the E/KDE stuff crawls...), but being able to open a terminal, use emacs/gcc/ssh/etc. make you feel at home even if you come from the unix world.
We had some installation problems: in the upgrade the HD was replaced with a new (blank) one, and it was only after putting it in that we found that the MacOS9 given with X requires a firmware upgrade to be installed correctly (why X does not require it is beyond me). The upgrade program is on the installation CD, but it requires booting from a writable device (no booting from the CD), so we were forced to install MacOS8, upgrade the firmware, reformat the disk and install 9+X.
I've not looked into the configuration-through-the-command-line issues, for what was needed (setting up the eth card for the local network) the graphics configuration tools were fine.
The idea of requiring an administrator password to make changes is nice, since it provides a protection which is missing in the old MacOS as in the Win9x world, and which ensures that no stupid mistake will screw up the system.
Package installation is a vey very nice: drag the file with the "box" icon to your disk and it's done.
I've not yet been able to burn a CD in any format. I've slipped in a blank CD, and it asks me to initialize it, but even with admin provilege there's no way I can partition/format/??? it with the disk utility. Using an image passes through the disk copy utility which looks like a fairly ultimate image management program, but it refused to create an iso9660 image and crashed on me after a short time. I just downloaded the latest system update and I'll see if it fixes the issues.....
Overall, it's worth just for the stress reduction of having my wife scream when the system locked hard with all her data lost in never-never land
This message is not a troll,
No, it's just completely -1 offtopic. There are lots of threads about licensing where it may have a place (ok, it's written to sound like trolling, so it may end up moderated accordingly), but here it's just out of place.
Too bad I don't have an "offtopic" for you.
From the link:
Energy Department scientists contend those issues either have been resolved or can be dealt with as a final design for the facility goes through the licensing process.
I don't understand: if there still are issues which are not resolved, how can the decision to put the dump there be taken? What if the issues CANNOT be dealt with during the final phase? Does anyone believe that they will they be able to admit and back out?
I'm not surprised that the local politicians (and I suppose also the population) are NOT happy about it....
Also, in the post-9/11 world it'll be much harder to keep en eye on what's happening as "for security reasons" lots of stuff has been pulled from the Internet. For example, in France we have a recycling site at La Hague which used to give access to many webcams inside the installation (the new director's policy was "absolute transparency" to reassure citizens), but now they are offline....
Reminds me why I will never work with Artificial Intelligence. Even assuming something can be made, the use of it will guarantee that it spends all of its time (brain cycles?) to find a way to eliminate all humans....[1] :)
But even more scary is that suppose it works: where will it be applied first of all? It'll be placed inside a WEAPON. What a good idea
[1] After all what would you do to people who plan to send you to death in some meaningless place or threaten to switch you off? It'll also be easy, since human brain runs at 14Hz(?) while his/her/its may run 10^8 times faster....
A list of Error 404 - file not found links.... :)
I'm still wondering if this is a simple error or a very funny joke about the endless number of licenses....
The only workable solution I can see is not very workable at all. You need to watermark ALL the "copyrighted" stuff and make sure that players only play it when it's coming from "legitimate media" (CPRM anyone?). Tricks like disc regions unwritable by consumer-level recorders may work.
Now, if you rip and reencode the watermark is present, but since your copy is (of course) not on legitimate media the player will refuse to play it.
Now, this is all nice and wonderful, except for a VERY MINOR problem: i.e. nobody says that you should use the compression algorithm supported by the players. If I rip to some random video format and then use some random computer program to play it, the "certified" video player never comes into play, so no copy control is possible.
This too has solutions, of course, like embedding copy control systems into the output device (= monitor). By using a crypto handshake between all the devices, from disc reader to monitor, it can be the monitor itself which refuses to display the watermarked data. Since forging the crypto handshake can be extremely hard, you would be forced to degrade the video quality until the watermark is lost, losing the advantage of digital copies.
Now, technologically this is probably feasible and would be very hard to defeat. Flat screen producers would very much like to be able to include electronics on the screen itself, since connecting the matrix to the control electronics is a pain, and this would make the hardware virtually unbreakable. What I think the REAL problem is, is that economically the growth of the last years has been brought by the amount of free stuff circulating. I cannot prove this, but I think, for example, that the price of HD went down because of Napster/warez/broadband. By locking all the stuff down at hardware level you kill the incentive to buy new hardware, since: 1- people don't need it, 2- the new hardware is as locked down at the old, so there's no added benefit in upgrading (while graphics cards still have room for improvement, the current CPUs are already way too fast for "end-user" use, the RAM very cheap, disk space almost free, audio as good as it's needed.... and there isn't much else in the general "multimedia" PC....). Whatever company follow this strategy will basically gut itself in face of the "non-compliant" ones which provide added value in terms of less control.
You are perfectly right when you say:
It seems to me that whenever the powers-that-wanna-be try to establish total control of digital media, they lose whatever control or influence they already had. Why not redirect efforts toward better fair-use policies, reasonable licensing schemes, and accept that somebody will copy your work no matter what you do?
Video rental stores seem to live quite well, and a "global renting store" via internet downloads would probably work very well. The problem is that it would be forced to apply prices which people find reasonable, which would undercut the massive profits of the content indistry (this is why they are fighting this at full steam). To give an idea of a "reasonable price" consider the cost of storing it on HD (including classification/retrieval, etc.), of download bandwidth and (this last is a negative value) the nuisance of waiting for the download (if you already have it on your HD you don't have to wait). People now hoards warez/music for the fear that the only other way to get it will be paying lots of money (both now or in the future), but would they really fill up gigs and gigs of HD and CD if the knew that for $X ot $Y/month you can just redownload it when you need?
Overall, I think that the outcome is inevitable, my only fear is the "collateral damage" which will result while the fighting continues....
Very good point. In all cases the individual maximizes the function "individual gain" playing with all the variables it can access. If punishment is one of those and it plays a role it'll get used as well.
I know you'll never believe this coming from an anti-DMCA type like me, but I kinda like these news. The reason is this: I think that the RIAA/MPAA/whatever are preparing themselves for a VERY harsh wake-up when they find out that Microsoft cares zero-nilch-nada-nothing about their interests. Microsoft's aim is market dominance and experience shows that it can be obtained much more readily by massive availability of stuff and not massive control. I predict that (obviously) the WMP formats will be cracked (didn't it already happen?) and Microsoft will very gladly look the other way while tons of pirated stuff get exchanged in WMP format only playable on Windows or Microsoft-licensed players. They'll invest 5% of the huge profits they make in PR towards the aforementioned RIMPAA, who will actually learn that Microsoft are the very best in security/content protection and whatever other solution will be worse.
Global result: for the price of a windows license and some gigs of disk the users get unlimited access to (pirated) content. Users are happy. Microsoft is happy. RIAA/MPAA are screwed.
It'll be fun to watch.....
15 28778 1.40% Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;)
Ok, #12 says it is Mac, and #15 doesn't say at all.
It's probably junkbuster, which screws up the user-agent field with some obscure old stuff.
I like the answer on lowendmac. Not the article, but the statistics. Beside that, could it be that we're witnessing the same "netscape effect" of the web? The article says that lots of web developers use those statistics to build sites. Translation: they only target IE. I can believe this, since I use galeon and I often have quirks in commercial sites. Now, if your site works well only with IE I'm not surprised that 98% of the visitors use IE.... Just like netscape-enhanced sites used to justify their attitude by saying that "90%+ of the visitors use netscape"....
(Note: I use Windows == IE. I don't know the statistics of Ns/Mozilla/Opera vs IE on windows, am I guessing right that they are a tiny %?).
Don't you think that just the fact that basically the ONLY possible answer is "use Linux" (or any other free-software OS system) is a very good indicator of how bad the situation is?
I'm not talking about Microsoft monopoly, but of a general trend of the market (as it was already pointed out by someone else) to force updates, or, better, to convert sale into subscription. We see it more in the software market because the lifecycle is much shorter (both for technical - fast evolution - and economical - mantaining current profits - reasons), but it happens also in other markets.
I mean, it's NATURAL that with the advance of technology old things become obsolete, but it's a bad sign when, as you point out, the whole thing becomes just a strategy to "maximize profit".
If the software market is the one where it's most visible, it's somewhat counter-balanced by the free software community. The same approach does not work as well for "real" objects (even if e.g. in the case of old cars you have clubs of fans who exchange parts/experience to mantain them).
You'll forgive me then if the only answer I can provide is to start whining that you should use linux
Not a troll but a real question... Does the porn industry already have established digital characters like this?
I remember once when I was playing a mud and one of the players said he was looking for models to set up a porn site. I said to him: why don't you try something new and ray-trace them and create a new type of porn? He answered that the thing was not original at all and several sites of that type already existed. And this was some 6 years ago....
I guess that if you're willing to waste some time looking around you can find something.
Got any links or should I just look in standard locations? (Kernel archives, freshmeat?)
It's the one at cryptoapi.sourceforge.net. I didn't mention a link since it was in the story submission.
The kernel patch you refer to is not outdated. There just is no reason to release new versions. Here's how you patch your kernel with the international patch.
Actually, I remember reading (mailing list? cryptoapi doc? newsgroup?) that the patch-int should NOT be used, because the implementation of several cyphers (twofish comes to mind) is broken.
As I already wrote in another post, I didn't do extensive testing to compare patch-int and cryptoapi, but I *did* have lost data with patch-int: some files got garbled beyond repair (to quantify, I'd say less than 1% of them). I was using twofish.
Now I'm using cryptoapi, and I didn't have any trouble (at least not yet).
Another point: you may have troubles with losetup/mount, depending on the distribution you use. In that case, download util-linux from the kernel site, apply the patches and recompile. I keep two separate copies (called losetup-crypto and (u)mount-crypto) of the utilities.
I don't think I agree with the the suggestion about reiserfs. ReiserFS has no trouble with fsck simply because it doesn't do fsck... I'd suggest use whatever you want but disable auto-checking or, even better, modify the startup scripts to make sure that the passphrase is good (just try to mount the fs) before attempting a fsck.