Did anybody else notice how seamlessly this MS schill duped us into taking something for granted? He starts spewing BS on the fourth sentance:
This will create a large marketplace with lots of competition because it won't be just the big companies that can swallow the piracy loss entering the market.
Get that? He uses the term _piracy loss_ as through it were an actual loss. Remember how the piracy "loss" occurs: 1: company makes copyrighted product 2: company distributes x number of legit copies of product 3: copyright infringing folks make y illegitimate copies 4: company assumes that it will earn $(x+y)*price charged 5: company remembers that copyright infringers don't pay, and subtracts the $y*price charged (ie the "priacy loss") (Yeah, yeah... 6: profit. actually true in this case)
In other words, there is no such thing as a "piracy loss", rather there's a lack of earnings. This may be too subtle for MS schills, but I think it's just selective perception.
A nearly separate comment about the same sentance: He pretends that only big companies will be willing to distribute non-DRM content. I have observed that it's almost exactly the opposite of that. Think about this: who has the most to lose from copyright infringement? The little companies/independent producers? The real danger for little guys is that of not being heard of. For them, each illegal copy is a bit of free advertisement. If a little company sees 100,000 illegal copies and 20,000 legal copies get bought, that's probably a big success for the little company. Odds are they would have had trouble selling 5000 without the illegal copies.
No, it's the big companies that have the most to lose from copyright infringement. When the next blockbuster big-budget movie comes out, the distribution goal isn't to get more people to want to see it (that's what the saturation advertising is for). The optimum goal is to get more people to _pay_ for seeing it. For the gigantic companies, DRM is just what the doctor ordered.
There are a lot more unjustifiable statements in the above, but I think I'll stop here as this comment is already too bloody long.
Oh, your brain isn't compatible with the new DRM? Our team of specialists will be right on that, sir. The scar on your forhead will hardly be noticable.
DRM does work. It doesn't have to work all the time.
That depends greatly on what you think the point of DRM is. If you feel the point of DRM is to inconvenience users and make it more difficult to use the stuff they've bought in nonstandard ways, then no, DRM doesn't have to work every time. On the other hand, if you feel that the point is to make it impossible for massive copying of the work to happen, then DRM does indeed have to work all the time. As soon as DRM fails exactly once, the un-DRM'ed copy exists. As soon as the data exists, then the copying part is easy (that's what p2p is all about). No joe-schmoe user ever has to understand how to break DRM, they just have to know how to use some p2p app, which they've proven remarkably adept at doing.
People here kid themselves that if everything was available for free with no DRM at all content providers would still make some money.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here, but you're free to do so. I'd just like to mention that Docotorow does, indeed, sell copies of his books that are available free with no DRM. While not a general disproof of your point, it's at least a contrary case.
Content providers move to new tech. It doesn't have to work forever. Just enough time to cash in.
No DRM procedure actually provides copy prevention for very long. The longest I can think of is the CSS on DVDs. Does anybody know of a DRM scheme on a mass-market product that worked for a long time? Anyway, these days they don't even last long enough to "cash in". They just still manage to sell copies because most users either don't don't feel it's worth the effort to get a copied version, don't know how, or feel it's more morally appropriate to buy one.
You're right. The problem isn't the way we burn the fuel; it's where we get it. Any method that requires the global petroleum distribution system to remain intact just so I can get my groceries just seems like a bad idea to me. That's why I've been looking into the idea of growing oil-producing algae as a fuel supply. The oil they produce is a pretty good stock for making biodiesel. It turns out that most of the research has already been done; it's just a matter of implementing the ideas.
Wikipedia article here
Plutonium 239 is the one used in nuclear weapons and some nuclear power plants.
Pu238 has a halflife of 88 years, and the decay mode is fission (so it outputs quite a lot of energy) or alpha emission. Quoth the wiki:
"The plutonium isotope 238Pu is an alpha emitter with a half-life of 87 years. These characteristics make it well suited for electrical power generation for devices which must function without direct maintenance for timescales approximating a human lifetime. It is therefore used in RTGs such as those powering the Galileo and Cassini space probes; earlier versions of the same technology powered seismic experiments on the Apollo Moon missions. 238Pu has been used successfully to power artificial heart pacemakers, to reduce the risk of repeated surgery. It has been largely replaced by lithium-based batteries recharged by induction, but as of 2003 there were somewhere between 50 and 100 plutonium-powered pacemakers still implanted and functioning in living patients."
Those 238's before the Pu's are supposed to be superscripted, but slashdot doesn't think that's good enough, apparently.
There's an interestig comment near the bottom of TFA:
"The government has spent millions of pounds to change public awareness of drink-driving and smoking.
"As a society, we need to go through a similar process for creativity and intellectual property."
What the author doesn't seem to see (or possibly doesn't want to see) is that both drunk driving and smoking hurt members of the general public, and it still took a lot of effort to reduce them. Copyright violation mostly just hurts big companies (if anyone, but that's a separate argument). It'd be very hard to convince people to internalize that as their own problem.
Just to be anal about it, it's 50kW * 24hours/day * $0.1/kW*hour = $120. As another reply stated, however, I'm pretty sure the power stated in the article was peak (ie when most of the drives are spinning up, I'd guess), not constant or average. The peak power draw is what you have to build the electrical systems to handle.
From what I have read, it would appear that they are using the fair use exclusion along with (possibly) the DMCA's network-provider loophole. I would guess that they're using the network-provider loophole based on the text of their copyright policy here (scroll to the bottom). The way the DMCA exclusion works is that they have to fix copyright infringement as soon as they're notified, and that looks like what they're asking for (and making it as difficult as they're legally allowed to, I might add).
For those who still need to read up on how a quantum computer is supposed to work, I recommend this.
Re:Stallman = Socialist
on
Drafting GPL3
·
· Score: 1
That's nice. Did you even get around to reading the rest of my comment after you took that one sentance out of context? Based on your response, I'd say no.
Re:Stallman = Socialist
on
Drafting GPL3
·
· Score: 1
Turns out that by trying to make money off our discoveries, we were acting unethically! Who woulda thunk it?
I don't know what kind of scientific research you do, but at least in most universities I have had experience with, most research is paid for by grants. Therefore, you have to make those who gave the grant happy. This generally has nothing to do with only publishing your results in a specific journal.
To the best of my understanding, what Stallman was getting at is that research should be published in a free (libre) way. You've gotta' admit that the scientific journals have a pretty neat racket: they charge those publishing for the privilege to publish, and they charge subscribers pretty obscene prices too. (Yeah, I know they do the editing on that money, it still seems like far too much to me.)
What if it takes longer than 10-20 years to even have your creation become popular?
And what if it takes 100 years (or 250, or whatever the copyright term is by the time you read this) for you work to become popular? Either way you get screwed over by the system. The copyright system is not, and never was, designed as an ownership system. If it were, then it would be just as wrong to take away that ownership at the end of the copyright term as it was early on in the term.
Any machine production requires raw materials of some sort. Most factories require raw materials at least as thoroughly refined as these. Just because it doesn't use naturally occurring raw materials doesn't mean that it isn't an interesting achievement.
While I'm on the subject, it seems to me that the most reasonable way to create a self-replicator that can replicate from naturally ocurring materials (and the way for which this story is a first step) is to start with a robot which can self-replicate from pretty advanced raw materials, and work on developing it further so that the materials needed become progressively cheaper and less refined for future versions. With enough such development (and open source methodology has proven pretty good at that sort of development) it should eventually be a very versatile self-replicator.
But then again, how long would it take for each robot to manufacture another copy, versus having a modular assembly line? I don't see self-replicating robots breaking into major industrial use.
Then I would say that you haven't thought carefully about the math involved. For example, say you have one assembly line that can produce 1000 robots (or whatever your product is) an hour, versus a robot that can produce a copy of itself in 24 hours. This is a chart of the robots produced by each method:
Time (hours) Assembly Line Self-Replicators
24 24,000 1 (plus the original)
48 48,000 3
72 72,000 7
96 96,000 15 ...
240 240,000 1023 ...
432 432,000 262,143
456 456,000 524,287
480 480,000 1048575 ...
24*n 24*n*1000 2^n-1 (n is # of days)
So, as you can see, when you first start out, the self-replicators seem to be going really slowly. In my example, at day 19 the self-replicators have achieved a higher total than the assembly line. After that, the self-replicators are clearly superior. The self replicators follow a different expansion law, however, so in the long run they will always win. If the replicators are slower or the assembly line faster, that only changes the multiplying factor and not the underlying function. In the long run the self-replicators must win in this sort of race.
It is the very flexibility of pc gaming that keeps it active. Sure, you can do racing games and fps on a console easily enough, but you'll never see something like the popularity of warcraft 3 or command and conquer on a console. (Yeah, I kow that versions warcrat 2 and tiberian sun exist on PSX, etc. but have you ever tried to play those? The interface blows.) Both the strength and the curse of console gaming is that there are no patches, and always standard hardware to run on.
What the parent was getting at, however, was the "limited times" part of the above. The way it's been done lately is that every time copyrights start to expire, congress adds an amendment extending all existing copyrights for another 20 years. This means that at any one time, the copyright term certainly is limited, but the net effect is that of eternal copyrights.
Another point that I feel is important is that, given the text above, it's pretty questionable to extend the term of an existing copyright. If the point of copyright is to promote the useful arts, then a new copyright law which doesn't promote such things should be unconstitutional (in my underinformed opinion). How exactly would another 20 years of copyright protection now make Walt Disney produce more or better quality art back in the 1930s?
These are many of the same people that believe people are born with the right to pirate their copy of Windows because Microsoft has tons of money.
But people are born with the right to copy almost anything. That is simply built into the nature of the universe: any data that can be read can be copied. To make a work uncopyable, you just have to destroy all copies of it.
It is we humans who have decided to try to limit that right to copy. We did this for a very good reason: to try to convince people to make more and more useful works. But the simple fact that we (or at least our governments) decided to trade in the right to make copies (which most people couldn't really execute back then anyway, lacking printing presses, etc.) in exchange for more works being created doesn't mean that that was the correct decision now and forever.
I thing they'd really just end up with the RedHat name, and nothing else.
Naw, they also get that spiffy red fedora picture! That's gotta' be worth at least 50 million right there.
Slashdot Mirror
Did anybody else notice how seamlessly this MS schill duped us into taking something for granted? He starts spewing BS on the fourth sentance:
This will create a large marketplace with lots of competition because it won't be just the big companies that can swallow the piracy loss entering the market.
Get that? He uses the term _piracy loss_ as through it were an actual loss. Remember how the piracy "loss" occurs:
1: company makes copyrighted product
2: company distributes x number of legit copies of product
3: copyright infringing folks make y illegitimate copies
4: company assumes that it will earn $(x+y)*price charged
5: company remembers that copyright infringers don't pay, and subtracts the $y*price charged (ie the "priacy loss")
(Yeah, yeah... 6: profit. actually true in this case)
In other words, there is no such thing as a "piracy loss", rather there's a lack of earnings. This may be too subtle for MS schills, but I think it's just selective perception.
A nearly separate comment about the same sentance: He pretends that only big companies will be willing to distribute non-DRM content. I have observed that it's almost exactly the opposite of that. Think about this: who has the most to lose from copyright infringement? The little companies/independent producers? The real danger for little guys is that of not being heard of. For them, each illegal copy is a bit of free advertisement. If a little company sees 100,000 illegal copies and 20,000 legal copies get bought, that's probably a big success for the little company. Odds are they would have had trouble selling 5000 without the illegal copies.
No, it's the big companies that have the most to lose from copyright infringement. When the next blockbuster big-budget movie comes out, the distribution goal isn't to get more people to want to see it (that's what the saturation advertising is for). The optimum goal is to get more people to _pay_ for seeing it. For the gigantic companies, DRM is just what the doctor ordered.
There are a lot more unjustifiable statements in the above, but I think I'll stop here as this comment is already too bloody long.
Oh, your brain isn't compatible with the new DRM? Our team of specialists will be right on that, sir. The scar on your forhead will hardly be noticable.
Good point. I would mention that Ben Franklin quote about now, except this is slashdot so everybody knows one or another mangled form of it.
This has got to be about the fifth time today I've wished I hadn't wasted all of my mod points yesterday.
DRM does work. It doesn't have to work all the time.
That depends greatly on what you think the point of DRM is. If you feel the point of DRM is to inconvenience users and make it more difficult to use the stuff they've bought in nonstandard ways, then no, DRM doesn't have to work every time. On the other hand, if you feel that the point is to make it impossible for massive copying of the work to happen, then DRM does indeed have to work all the time. As soon as DRM fails exactly once, the un-DRM'ed copy exists. As soon as the data exists, then the copying part is easy (that's what p2p is all about). No joe-schmoe user ever has to understand how to break DRM, they just have to know how to use some p2p app, which they've proven remarkably adept at doing.
People here kid themselves that if everything was available for free with no DRM at all content providers would still make some money.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here, but you're free to do so. I'd just like to mention that Docotorow does, indeed, sell copies of his books that are available free with no DRM. While not a general disproof of your point, it's at least a contrary case.
Content providers move to new tech. It doesn't have to work forever. Just enough time to cash in.
No DRM procedure actually provides copy prevention for very long. The longest I can think of is the CSS on DVDs. Does anybody know of a DRM scheme on a mass-market product that worked for a long time? Anyway, these days they don't even last long enough to "cash in". They just still manage to sell copies because most users either don't don't feel it's worth the effort to get a copied version, don't know how, or feel it's more morally appropriate to buy one.
You're right. The problem isn't the way we burn the fuel; it's where we get it. Any method that requires the global petroleum distribution system to remain intact just so I can get my groceries just seems like a bad idea to me. That's why I've been looking into the idea of growing oil-producing algae as a fuel supply. The oil they produce is a pretty good stock for making biodiesel. It turns out that most of the research has already been done; it's just a matter of implementing the ideas.
Am I the only one who thought: $1300? If he was selling them at the correct price, he made more money than that.
Check out the neat pictures at The Gallery of Fluid Mechanics.
Just because I don't know what meaning a picture conveys doesn't make it nonscientific, does it?
Obligatory Southpark quote:
Simpsons did it!
Wikipedia article here
Plutonium 239 is the one used in nuclear weapons and some nuclear power plants. Pu238 has a halflife of 88 years, and the decay mode is fission (so it outputs quite a lot of energy) or alpha emission. Quoth the wiki:
"The plutonium isotope 238Pu is an alpha emitter with a half-life of 87 years. These characteristics make it well suited for electrical power generation for devices which must function without direct maintenance for timescales approximating a human lifetime. It is therefore used in RTGs such as those powering the Galileo and Cassini space probes; earlier versions of the same technology powered seismic experiments on the Apollo Moon missions.
238Pu has been used successfully to power artificial heart pacemakers, to reduce the risk of repeated surgery. It has been largely replaced by lithium-based batteries recharged by induction, but as of 2003 there were somewhere between 50 and 100 plutonium-powered pacemakers still implanted and functioning in living patients."
Those 238's before the Pu's are supposed to be superscripted, but slashdot doesn't think that's good enough, apparently.
There's an interestig comment near the bottom of TFA:
"The government has spent millions of pounds to change public awareness of drink-driving and smoking.
"As a society, we need to go through a similar process for creativity and intellectual property."
What the author doesn't seem to see (or possibly doesn't want to see) is that both drunk driving and smoking hurt members of the general public, and it still took a lot of effort to reduce them. Copyright violation mostly just hurts big companies (if anyone, but that's a separate argument). It'd be very hard to convince people to internalize that as their own problem.
And this happens just when I was starting to think of IBM as the good guys...
Just to be anal about it, it's 50kW * 24hours/day * $0.1/kW*hour = $120. As another reply stated, however, I'm pretty sure the power stated in the article was peak (ie when most of the drives are spinning up, I'd guess), not constant or average. The peak power draw is what you have to build the electrical systems to handle.
I know geeks are lazy, etc. but did you ever consider... I don't know... changing the station?
From what I have read, it would appear that they are using the fair use exclusion along with (possibly) the DMCA's network-provider loophole. I would guess that they're using the network-provider loophole based on the text of their copyright policy here (scroll to the bottom). The way the DMCA exclusion works is that they have to fix copyright infringement as soon as they're notified, and that looks like what they're asking for (and making it as difficult as they're legally allowed to, I might add).
For those who still need to read up on how a quantum computer is supposed to work, I recommend this.
That's nice. Did you even get around to reading the rest of my comment after you took that one sentance out of context? Based on your response, I'd say no.
Turns out that by trying to make money off our discoveries, we were acting unethically! Who woulda thunk it?
I don't know what kind of scientific research you do, but at least in most universities I have had experience with, most research is paid for by grants. Therefore, you have to make those who gave the grant happy. This generally has nothing to do with only publishing your results in a specific journal.
To the best of my understanding, what Stallman was getting at is that research should be published in a free (libre) way. You've gotta' admit that the scientific journals have a pretty neat racket: they charge those publishing for the privilege to publish, and they charge subscribers pretty obscene prices too. (Yeah, I know they do the editing on that money, it still seems like far too much to me.)
What if it takes longer than 10-20 years to even have your creation become popular?
And what if it takes 100 years (or 250, or whatever the copyright term is by the time you read this) for you work to become popular? Either way you get screwed over by the system. The copyright system is not, and never was, designed as an ownership system. If it were, then it would be just as wrong to take away that ownership at the end of the copyright term as it was early on in the term.
Any machine production requires raw materials of some sort. Most factories require raw materials at least as thoroughly refined as these. Just because it doesn't use naturally occurring raw materials doesn't mean that it isn't an interesting achievement.
While I'm on the subject, it seems to me that the most reasonable way to create a self-replicator that can replicate from naturally ocurring materials (and the way for which this story is a first step) is to start with a robot which can self-replicate from pretty advanced raw materials, and work on developing it further so that the materials needed become progressively cheaper and less refined for future versions. With enough such development (and open source methodology has proven pretty good at that sort of development) it should eventually be a very versatile self-replicator.
But then again, how long would it take for each robot to manufacture another copy, versus having a modular assembly line? I don't see self-replicating robots breaking into major industrial use.
...
...
...
Then I would say that you haven't thought carefully about the math involved. For example, say you have one assembly line that can produce 1000 robots (or whatever your product is) an hour, versus a robot that can produce a copy of itself in 24 hours. This is a chart of the robots produced by each method:
Time (hours) Assembly Line Self-Replicators
24 24,000 1 (plus the original)
48 48,000 3
72 72,000 7
96 96,000 15
240 240,000 1023
432 432,000 262,143
456 456,000 524,287
480 480,000 1048575
24*n 24*n*1000 2^n-1 (n is # of days)
So, as you can see, when you first start out, the self-replicators seem to be going really slowly. In my example, at day 19 the self-replicators have achieved a higher total than the assembly line. After that, the self-replicators are clearly superior. The self replicators follow a different expansion law, however, so in the long run they will always win. If the replicators are slower or the assembly line faster, that only changes the multiplying factor and not the underlying function. In the long run the self-replicators must win in this sort of race.
It is the very flexibility of pc gaming that keeps it active. Sure, you can do racing games and fps on a console easily enough, but you'll never see something like the popularity of warcraft 3 or command and conquer on a console.
(Yeah, I kow that versions warcrat 2 and tiberian sun exist on PSX, etc. but have you ever tried to play those? The interface blows.)
Both the strength and the curse of console gaming is that there are no patches, and always standard hardware to run on.
The problem is that as long as congress continues to (unconstitutionally) extend the life of copyrights, they aren't really limited.
You should be careful saying that. It happens that I agree with you, but not everybody does. It works like this:
The constitution says that congress may "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" . That's a pretty loaded statement, and I could argue that very long term copyrights don't promote the progress of science and the useful arts, but in the absence of experimental evidence I couldn't prove it.
What the parent was getting at, however, was the "limited times" part of the above. The way it's been done lately is that every time copyrights start to expire, congress adds an amendment extending all existing copyrights for another 20 years. This means that at any one time, the copyright term certainly is limited, but the net effect is that of eternal copyrights.
Another point that I feel is important is that, given the text above, it's pretty questionable to extend the term of an existing copyright. If the point of copyright is to promote the useful arts, then a new copyright law which doesn't promote such things should be unconstitutional (in my underinformed opinion). How exactly would another 20 years of copyright protection now make Walt Disney produce more or better quality art back in the 1930s?
These are many of the same people that believe people are born with the right to pirate their copy of Windows because Microsoft has tons of money.
But people are born with the right to copy almost anything. That is simply built into the nature of the universe: any data that can be read can be copied. To make a work uncopyable, you just have to destroy all copies of it.
It is we humans who have decided to try to limit that right to copy. We did this for a very good reason: to try to convince people to make more and more useful works. But the simple fact that we (or at least our governments) decided to trade in the right to make copies (which most people couldn't really execute back then anyway, lacking printing presses, etc.) in exchange for more works being created doesn't mean that that was the correct decision now and forever.
Are you seriously trying to say that opiates are less harmful than alcohol? You do know that cocaine is the quintessential opiate, don't you?
I thing they'd really just end up with the RedHat name, and nothing else.
Naw, they also get that spiffy red fedora picture! That's gotta' be worth at least 50 million right there.