Babelfish (or perhaps the Brazilian site) appeared slashdotted, so here's a copy of the english translation of the article linked above:
PF investigates project of frauds in the election of the River
Rio De Janeiro - the Federal Policy opened inquiry to investigate a presumption project of fraud in the elections for state deputy of the last year. On the basis of denunciation of a defeated competitor, Ronaldo Antonio Da Silva, of the PT of the B, the PF selects a supposed net of venda of embezzled votes. It hisses, that it gave deposition in last day 23 in the policy, questions the security of the informatizado system of voting and totalling of the votes.
It took a writing in the which colloquy with a man who charges R$ 10 for adulterated vote to favor candidates in the municipal elections of the year that comes. As He hisses, the project would involve employees of the TRE. The denouncer presented to the PF totalling bulletin copies that, according to it, would have resulted of the verification of 65% of the votes. He hisses says that a candidate had more than a thousand votes computed in the bulletin and in the result of the TRE he appears without vote, nor its proper one. To all, 41 candidates had had voting zero.
The president of the TRE of the River, Alvaro Mayrink, did not have if sharp on the denunciations until the end of the afternoon.
Government enforced cable monopolies Government enforced telco monopolies
"The government does not enforce any monopolies. It's just kinda hard to put in two cable networks to the same damn house."
Actually, there _are_ places where there are multiple competing cable companies. Most towns make one cable company a monopoly because then they could do a deal with one company in return for the monopoly contract. If they just let them all compete, they can't extract concessions. Of course, the "invisible" downside is that cable TV rates skyrocket when there isn't competition, so the monopoly deals backfired. Luckily satellite TV, etc., are creating some competition so that there's hope that cable rates might not possible keep climbing...
And, of course, the breakup of the telco monopoly has been fantastic -- customers have more options, better products, and dramatically lower pricing than under "Ma Bell". Sure, life is a little more complicated, but did you really like renting a trimline for $8 a month forever?
They can release the source code for public verification and auditing without licensing it for actual use in an election, so people would be able to audit it to establish trust, but would still have to go to the company to license the system. Compare this to a patent -- you completely and publicly document your invention, and have a monopoly on its use. Without public disclosure, there's no reason for anyone to trust you...
Paper receipts are worthless -- not only do they rely on everyone keeping theirs (and turning it in when asked, etc.) in case of a recount, but there's no guarantee that the vote printed on the receipt matches the vote recorded in the eVoting system.
The only system that works is having people make marks on paper that they can look at and verify, then put into an independent tallying device to count the votes, which rejects invalid votes immediately so that they can be corrected. And in the even of a recount, the paper can be re-scanned.
Astoundingly enough, such devices not only exist, they're cheap, reliable, and fairly widely used -- scantrons! They have the lowest error rate of any voting mechanism, and cost almost nothing.
I have no idea why anyone would even consider an untested (and un-auditable) touchscreen terminal that costs thousands of dollars instead of a scantron that costs almost nothing (the forms cost about 10 cents, and the election board can borrow the scantron from the local schools).
Luckily (http://newshound.de.siu.edu/spring03/stories/stor yReader$1954) not everyone is so enamored of technology that they overlook the obvious.
But just to keep us on our toes, these morons (http://clients.enfocom.com/avs/products_winvote.h tml) actually put wireless LAN interfaces on their touchscreen machines ("The functionality linchpin of the WINvoteTM system is its wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11b) system - called the Wireless Information Network (WIN) -- that enables the user to communicate remotely with the major components of the voting system.")
Isn't anyone with a brain cell writing the requirements for these voting systems? You'd think that secure and auditable would be adjectives that you'd want in a voting system.
It sure looks to me like all of these e-Voting companies are scammers chasing after the huge pile of money that the government committed to spending to fix the problems in 2000, and they're willing to say or do anything (aside from engineer in a responsible manner) in order to grab the money. So they'll argue with a straight face for "security through obscurity" because they certainly don't have any other security, and fight any real peformance or code audits by technically knowledgable people because they know that they can't pass an audit.
if they really believed that their systems were secure, they'd post the source code publicly and issue a huge cash reward to anyone who cracks their software and tells them how. that way they'll flush out as many security flaws as possible, and have a solution that at least people can somewhat trust.
By releasing the source code I'm not saying that it has to be open source -- they could retain copyrights, etc., and the various governments would have to license the software from them -- but since we can all read it, or set up our own test instances, etc., we can prove to ourselves whether it works in a secure, auditable manner.
Re:At least one instance of suicide bombing
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I guess with bombs you don't have the problem of changing your mind once you've made the decision...
Re:Translated for the America-Impaired
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Who Needs Radio?
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" A suicide bomber is someone that blows themself up.
A homicide bomber is someone that blows themself up with the intent of blowing others up."
Correction: By your definition, then, there has never in history of the world been an intentional "suicide bomber". Rather than attempt to spin that one, let's just admint that "homicide bomber" is a pathetic attempt by FOX to rename suicide bombers in order to portray them more negatively.
It's almost as weird as how newspeople are using the word "bias" instead of "hate". As in "johnny was the victim of a bias crime". I have no idea what that one's about.
I understand your point, but for me (living in Manhattan) the internet was the only decent communications medium on 9/11/01. The television was mindlessly looping 30 seconds of video (that I did _not_ want my kids to memorize), the telephones didn't work most of the time, the cell phone network was useless (and as a decent human being you'd want to avoid consuming either, so that emergency workers could get their jobs done) and the internet was JUST FINE. I could get info I needed, when I needed it, with no outages. I could email people, and receive email, just fine. So I spend the next few days playing in the park with my kids and using the internet for communication -- quite pleasant, actually, except for everything smelling like burnt concrete, and feeling jumpy every time a fighter plane circled the city (which was every few minutes).
I can get prints from JPEG's for as low as 18 cents, or litte cheaper than film (where you have to pay for processing the negative as well as the printing). This isn't too surprising, since it's the same equipment run by the same people, using either film or JPEG's as input, so the prices are in line with the actual costs (i.e. photo printing is a terrible business to be in). Of course, if you're selective about printing, the savings are greater.
If the digital printing costs are much higher where you live, I'd look into mail order. It's not worth it for occasional prints, where I'd recommend ink jet printing (60 cents per photo on ink jet is cheaper than 18 cents plus $2.99 shipping costs), but if you print entire rolls, the online digital printers are quite good. Some friends of mine wrote some software (www.preclick.com) that organizes photo's and manages the bulk uploading, etc., so you might want to check that out. It's a free download for Windows.
Yeah, you could scan the negatives. That means either buying a negative scanner (cost more than most digicams) or paying someone to do the scan (ouch). Still, scanning negatives is way more convenient than scanning prints...
My vote is "market segmentation" -- they're only going to sell a fairly small number of DSLR's compared to point-and-shoot cameras, and they probably cost more to develop.
Proportionately, I think that DSLR's cost more than DPAS (just made that acronym up) by about as much as a regular SLR costs more than a PAS camera. You can get decent PAS film camera for $100, and a comparable DPAS for $300. You can get an SLR body for $300, and a DSLR body for $800. Given that there's a lot more inside a digicam that seems about right. Just keep saying to yourself -- no more paying for film, no more paying for prints except for the ones you really like, no more scanning of PhotoCD processing, and you can experiment more... it's worth it, really!
It depends on the level of camera. Back when I was CTO of Sotheby's we did extensive testing of digital cameras vs. film, and even 4 years ago high-end digital cameras (the $15K kind) were clearly superior to any film cameras for catalog production. It was debatable whether the source photo was better digital or analog, but by the time you produced a printed catalog, the digital image was not only better quality (no scanning/stripping/etc.) but also much, much cheaper to operate. You have no idea how much film was consumed producting 500+ catalogues a year; we converted the studios to very high-end digital gear and the cost justification was pretty easy.
I would agree that you can't get an affordable digicam that beats slow film for studio shots, or get quite as good results in low light, but those are pretty unusual cases. For most people shooting in most situations, a digicam is better than film. And (IMO more importantly) since there's no cost to shooting, a digicam encourages you to shoot tons of photo's which is the best way to become a better photographer.
That being said, the technology keeps improving in quality and dropping in price, so you can always justify waiting if you want to. But if you wait a year, that's another year of photo's on film that are _way_ less useful than digital files.
"Uh.... HUH? There aren't export restrictions on CDs. And the only restrictions on DVDs are those which the DVD Consortium artificially imposed. Which is technically in massive breech of a number of international free-trade treaties."
If you live in the US and you try to buy a CD from amazon.co.uk they'll tell you that they can't sell it to you. This isn't due to an export restriction, but because they're selling products that they're only licensed to sell in the UK. You have to go to amazon.com to buy in the US.
This is because (for example) the same album may be licensed to different companies to sell in the US and UK, and those companies have exclusive contracts. So if you have the exclusive license to sell an album in the US, you'll complain if a company in the UK is selling into the US (and costing you money).
It's not a matter of export restrictions, but of licensing contracts.
I agree, though, that the region coding on DVD's is pretty miserable. Companies can control where they allow their products to be sold, but once they're sold they shouldn't be able to control where they're used. Good thing region free DVD players are becoming so common (outside the US).
I agree that this is hugely beneficial. If they'd _asked_ the user for permission, it would be completely good instead of a mixed good. Silently making changes to system settings is just creepy, even if the changes are good, and the user wouldn't otherwise have made the changes.
It's amusing seeing AOL have to jump in to compensate for MS' failings, in order to make their customes happy (and save on support costs).
I think that a better metaphore would be "What if you bought a house from a builder who assured you that it was secure, and kids broke into it on a daily basis, but when you complained to the builder be blamed you for not spending 1/2 your waking hours marching around your house nailing shut all of the doors that he installed and left unlocked."
Right. Regression tests are there to make sure that:
1) Bugs that you've fixed don't get reintroduced by later code changes, 2) The system runs across a matrix of operating systems, platforms, etc., and 3) if you write your regression tests before you code the app (yay XP!) they're how you know that you're done coding your app.
Depending on what you're coding, you'll almost certainly need to suppliment regression testing with other forms of testing. I find that throwing naive users at software is a great testing scheme -- they try things no experienced user would think of. And you get usability testing for free!
I'll second this -- Mozilla's automated regression testing across all platforms, backed by a planet full of testers logging bugs into bugzilla, is light years ahead of the testing methodologies used at most of the many product companies that I know of. Wonderful stuff, but astoundingly hard to get right. Most companies engineer products to the level of "good enough to ship" -- open source projects engineer to the level of "good enough to make the developers happy" which is usually a much higher level, because the project's "customers" are engineers who can read your source code. It's frightening releasing code open source, and that's a good thing.:-)
Let's draw an analogy to physical CD's. If you buy them in the US, you can then move abroad and play them. But you can't (legally) buy any more US-only CD's. Of course, with physical products the usual answer is to buy from a US mail order company, paying with a US credit card, then shipping abroad. It's a hassle, but not exactly a new issue. Try ordering (from the US) from amazon.co.uk and you run into the same issue.
If it makes you feel better, Apple did in fact allow they guy who complained about losing access to his music after moving to Canada to re-authorize his music. He can't buy any more from iTMS (darned contracts) but he didn't lose access to anything, other than for the time it took to wrestle with customer support, which I recall was a few days.
You make a good point, that DRM gives some degree control over stuff you've bought to the content owner (or store, etc.). In Apple's case, they only have control at the instant when you authorize your computer, so once you've got your music they'll leave you alone. Except apparently that if you move to a new machine you need to authorize it against an account with a US credit card. But they don't check permissions every time you play, or every time you boot, etc., which is what could allow them to revoce someone's license" so it's a fairly benign DRM scheme. Of course, if you're really concerned, burn everything to an audio CD after you buy it, and it's yours as long as you keep the disk. CD-R's are cheap.:-)
Apple's also said that once you buy music it's yours, and that if you move, etc., they're not going to disable it. Pragmatically speaking, once your computer is authorized for your music, Apple never hears from it again, so there's no way that they could disable it. Even when you buy music, it doesn't affect the DRM, though they could decide that they can't sell you more music if you've moved to where they can't legally sell you music. But they can't disable your music (AFAIK) once it plays.
This is in contrast to some more "enthusiastic" DRM schemes (pretty much all of them) which check permissions on a per-file use, and can limit what actions you can take with your music. I've seen systems where you _can_ disable files on your computer whenever the content author wants. That's seriously creepy. So I agree with your basic point. I just don't think that Apple's DRM is a good example of that risk. Admittedly, Apple could modify their DRM software to be more intrusive, but so far they've acted with the consumer's interests in mind more than any other DRM vendor, so they don't worry me as much as others...
The post I replied to said that "The AHRA dictates that we have Fair Use copying rights, and some people are paying for that right in the form of surcharges." This isn't true -- the AHRA isn't charging anyone for exercising their fair use rights, it's compensating the record companies for the lost sales due to _illegal_ copying.
And the comparable law in Canada does (according to numerous posts on Slashdot and elsewhere) give consumers the right to make personal copies of music from CD's, which you could interpret (IANAL) to mean that in Canada you're paying higher fees on recordable media, but gain the right to make copies of music onto that media. The example people used in posts was that in Canada it's legal to check a CD out from a library (or borrow it from a friend) and burn a copy for personal use, which is not legal in the US.
"All DRM-locked forms of music distribution are a waste of money."
While I'm not a fan of DRM for many of the reasons you mentioned, realistically you could burn your music to CD's, at which point it's as "eternal" as any other CD's. Which is to sat that you'll have to copy them onto whatever format replaces CD's, the way we went through LP's, 8-tracks, cassettes, MiniDisks, 45's,...
It's entirely possible that AAC+FairPlay, as pure software, might be a longer lasting format than the CD medium. I know that.doc files have lasted longer than 5.25" floppy disks.:-)
My understanding is that iTunes will RIP and play any format supported by QuickTime. QuickTime is extensible, so there are Ogg Vorbis and DivX codec's packaged for QT, for example.
Of course, you still can't play Ogg Vorbis on the iPod. But perhaps some day...
I use almost nothing but smart playlists, for two reasons. First, it can automatically create playlists based on ID3 tags, so I can listen to 1960's music, or high bitrate jazz, etc. Second, I have a 5 GB iPod and almost 30 GB of music, so I can use playlists to magically collect a subset to carry with me.
Some examples: - 1 GB of My favorite music, based on how I rate it. - 1 GB of Most played music, which iTunes counts automatically. - 1 GB of most recently added music. - all of my Purchased Music. - all of my Audible audiobooks that are 'checked'. I can un-check them in iTunes once I've heard them, and they disappear from my iPod the next time I synch. - 1 GB of Random Music, so that I hear a few things I haven't heard in a while.
Of course, you can still access the music by genre, etc., -- the playlists are a way to force those tracks into the iPod. I listen to 'favorites' and 'recently added' playlists all the time, though.
You're right -- that's what I get for simplifying. All of the major artists set up their own publishing house, but not all. And contracts these days give the labels the right to sell music digitally as well as on physical media, so over time the digital music services will get better and better inventories. Also, as musicians see the services start to sell real volumes of music (yay iTMS) hopefully they'll decide that it's worth pursuing.
"What I'm curious about is whether the export restriction is still in effect. One truly NASTY bit in the contract people discovered was that if you move outside of the US, as soon as Apple finds out (the next time you log into the service) it nukes every one of your files, and no refund. If you haven't burned them, you're screwed. A couple guys lost hundreds of dollars in music because of that."
Minor correction -- Apple won't "nuke" your files (and doesn't appear to check anything except when you authorize a machine, when you enter your username and password into iTunes), but if you change your billing address to be outside of the US they won't re-authorize your music. In the case that got some press a few months ago, the guy had his machine crash, did a full reinstall, and then couldn't re-authorize his music because his billing address wasn't in the US, so Apple couldn't legally sell him music. I think that he ended up getting taken care of by customer service.
The cause of this regional issue is that music is licensed by country or region, so the company that has the right to distribute a song in the US (and thus licensed music to iTMS for sale in the) US may not have the right to distribute it in, say, England. This means that to launch iTMS in each country, Apple has to renegotiate the licenses to the music. Kinda sucks.
While I certainly agree that iTunes is the best PC music service, MusicMatch's new system (launched a few weeks ago) is also surprisingly good. It's less polished, but it makes the generally annoying WMA format fairly usable, which is quite a feat.
OK, that's not much of a recommendation. But to put it in perspective, check out BuyMusic.com, where EVERY SINGLE TRACK can have different pricing and usage rules. Hideous.
Right, there are pretty obvious ways that you can work around all of the limitations in FairPlay (Apple's DRM). It's really just there to serve as a "speed bump" so that someone breaking the rules knows that's what they're doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Babelfish (or perhaps the Brazilian site) appeared slashdotted, so here's a copy of the english translation of the article linked above:
PF investigates project of frauds in the election of the River
Rio De Janeiro - the Federal Policy opened inquiry to investigate a presumption project of fraud in the elections for state deputy of the last year. On the basis of denunciation of a defeated competitor, Ronaldo Antonio Da Silva, of the PT of the B, the PF selects a supposed net of venda of embezzled votes. It hisses, that it gave deposition in last day 23 in the policy, questions the security of the informatizado system of voting and totalling of the votes.
It took a writing in the which colloquy with a man who charges R$ 10 for adulterated vote to favor candidates in the municipal elections of the year that comes. As He hisses, the project would involve employees of the TRE. The denouncer presented to the PF totalling bulletin copies that, according to it, would have resulted of the verification of 65% of the votes. He hisses says that a candidate had more than a thousand votes computed in the bulletin and in the result of the TRE he appears without vote, nor its proper one. To all, 41 candidates had had voting zero.
The president of the TRE of the River, Alvaro Mayrink, did not have if sharp on the denunciations until the end of the afternoon.
Karine Rodrigues and Luciana Loyal Nunes
What do they have to do with the government?
Government enforced cable monopolies Government enforced telco monopolies
"The government does not enforce any monopolies. It's just kinda hard to put in two cable networks to the same damn house."
Actually, there _are_ places where there are multiple competing cable companies. Most towns make one cable company a monopoly because then they could do a deal with one company in return for the monopoly contract. If they just let them all compete, they can't extract concessions. Of course, the "invisible" downside is that cable TV rates skyrocket when there isn't competition, so the monopoly deals backfired. Luckily satellite TV, etc., are creating some competition so that there's hope that cable rates might not possible keep climbing...
And, of course, the breakup of the telco monopoly has been fantastic -- customers have more options, better products, and dramatically lower pricing than under "Ma Bell". Sure, life is a little more complicated, but did you really like renting a trimline for $8 a month forever?
They can release the source code for public verification and auditing without licensing it for actual use in an election, so people would be able to audit it to establish trust, but would still have to go to the company to license the system. Compare this to a patent -- you completely and publicly document your invention, and have a monopoly on its use. Without public disclosure, there's no reason for anyone to trust you...
Paper receipts are worthless -- not only do they rely on everyone keeping theirs (and turning it in when asked, etc.) in case of a recount, but there's no guarantee that the vote printed on the receipt matches the vote recorded in the eVoting system.
r yReader$1954) not everyone is so enamored of technology that they overlook the obvious.
h tml) actually put wireless LAN interfaces on their touchscreen machines ("The functionality linchpin of the WINvoteTM system is its wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11b) system - called the Wireless Information Network (WIN) -- that enables the user to communicate remotely with the major components of the voting system.")
The only system that works is having people make marks on paper that they can look at and verify, then put into an independent tallying device to count the votes, which rejects invalid votes immediately so that they can be corrected. And in the even of a recount, the paper can be re-scanned.
Astoundingly enough, such devices not only exist, they're cheap, reliable, and fairly widely used -- scantrons! They have the lowest error rate of any voting mechanism, and cost almost nothing.
I have no idea why anyone would even consider an untested (and un-auditable) touchscreen terminal that costs thousands of dollars instead of a scantron that costs almost nothing (the forms cost about 10 cents, and the election board can borrow the scantron from the local schools).
Luckily (http://newshound.de.siu.edu/spring03/stories/sto
But just to keep us on our toes, these morons (http://clients.enfocom.com/avs/products_winvote.
Isn't anyone with a brain cell writing the requirements for these voting systems? You'd think that secure and auditable would be adjectives that you'd want in a voting system.
It sure looks to me like all of these e-Voting companies are scammers chasing after the huge pile of money that the government committed to spending to fix the problems in 2000, and they're willing to say or do anything (aside from engineer in a responsible manner) in order to grab the money. So they'll argue with a straight face for "security through obscurity" because they certainly don't have any other security, and fight any real peformance or code audits by technically knowledgable people because they know that they can't pass an audit.
if they really believed that their systems were secure, they'd post the source code publicly and issue a huge cash reward to anyone who cracks their software and tells them how. that way they'll flush out as many security flaws as possible, and have a solution that at least people can somewhat trust.
By releasing the source code I'm not saying that it has to be open source -- they could retain copyrights, etc., and the various governments would have to license the software from them -- but since we can all read it, or set up our own test instances, etc., we can prove to ourselves whether it works in a secure, auditable manner.
I guess with bombs you don't have the problem of changing your mind once you've made the decision...
" A suicide bomber is someone that blows themself up.
A homicide bomber is someone that blows themself up with the intent of blowing others up."
Correction: By your definition, then, there has never in history of the world been an intentional "suicide bomber". Rather than attempt to spin that one, let's just admint that "homicide bomber" is a pathetic attempt by FOX to rename suicide bombers in order to portray them more negatively.
It's almost as weird as how newspeople are using the word "bias" instead of "hate". As in "johnny was the victim of a bias crime". I have no idea what that one's about.
I understand your point, but for me (living in Manhattan) the internet was the only decent communications medium on 9/11/01. The television was mindlessly looping 30 seconds of video (that I did _not_ want my kids to memorize), the telephones didn't work most of the time, the cell phone network was useless (and as a decent human being you'd want to avoid consuming either, so that emergency workers could get their jobs done) and the internet was JUST FINE. I could get info I needed, when I needed it, with no outages. I could email people, and receive email, just fine. So I spend the next few days playing in the park with my kids and using the internet for communication -- quite pleasant, actually, except for everything smelling like burnt concrete, and feeling jumpy every time a fighter plane circled the city (which was every few minutes).
I can get prints from JPEG's for as low as 18 cents, or litte cheaper than film (where you have to pay for processing the negative as well as the printing). This isn't too surprising, since it's the same equipment run by the same people, using either film or JPEG's as input, so the prices are in line with the actual costs (i.e. photo printing is a terrible business to be in). Of course, if you're selective about printing, the savings are greater.
If the digital printing costs are much higher where you live, I'd look into mail order. It's not worth it for occasional prints, where I'd recommend ink jet printing (60 cents per photo on ink jet is cheaper than 18 cents plus $2.99 shipping costs), but if you print entire rolls, the online digital printers are quite good. Some friends of mine wrote some software (www.preclick.com) that organizes photo's and manages the bulk uploading, etc., so you might want to check that out. It's a free download for Windows.
Yeah, you could scan the negatives. That means either buying a negative scanner (cost more than most digicams) or paying someone to do the scan (ouch). Still, scanning negatives is way more convenient than scanning prints...
My vote is "market segmentation" -- they're only going to sell a fairly small number of DSLR's compared to point-and-shoot cameras, and they probably cost more to develop.
Proportionately, I think that DSLR's cost more than DPAS (just made that acronym up) by about as much as a regular SLR costs more than a PAS camera. You can get decent PAS film camera for $100, and a comparable DPAS for $300. You can get an SLR body for $300, and a DSLR body for $800. Given that there's a lot more inside a digicam that seems about right. Just keep saying to yourself -- no more paying for film, no more paying for prints except for the ones you really like, no more scanning of PhotoCD processing, and you can experiment more... it's worth it, really!
It depends on the level of camera. Back when I was CTO of Sotheby's we did extensive testing of digital cameras vs. film, and even 4 years ago high-end digital cameras (the $15K kind) were clearly superior to any film cameras for catalog production. It was debatable whether the source photo was better digital or analog, but by the time you produced a printed catalog, the digital image was not only better quality (no scanning/stripping/etc.) but also much, much cheaper to operate. You have no idea how much film was consumed producting 500+ catalogues a year; we converted the studios to very high-end digital gear and the cost justification was pretty easy.
I would agree that you can't get an affordable digicam that beats slow film for studio shots, or get quite as good results in low light, but those are pretty unusual cases. For most people shooting in most situations, a digicam is better than film. And (IMO more importantly) since there's no cost to shooting, a digicam encourages you to shoot tons of photo's which is the best way to become a better photographer.
That being said, the technology keeps improving in quality and dropping in price, so you can always justify waiting if you want to. But if you wait a year, that's another year of photo's on film that are _way_ less useful than digital files.
"Uh.... HUH? There aren't export restrictions on CDs. And the only restrictions on DVDs are those which the DVD Consortium artificially imposed. Which is technically in massive breech of a number of international free-trade treaties."
If you live in the US and you try to buy a CD from amazon.co.uk they'll tell you that they can't sell it to you. This isn't due to an export restriction, but because they're selling products that they're only licensed to sell in the UK. You have to go to amazon.com to buy in the US.
This is because (for example) the same album may be licensed to different companies to sell in the US and UK, and those companies have exclusive contracts. So if you have the exclusive license to sell an album in the US, you'll complain if a company in the UK is selling into the US (and costing you money).
It's not a matter of export restrictions, but of licensing contracts.
I agree, though, that the region coding on DVD's is pretty miserable. Companies can control where they allow their products to be sold, but once they're sold they shouldn't be able to control where they're used. Good thing region free DVD players are becoming so common (outside the US).
I agree that this is hugely beneficial. If they'd _asked_ the user for permission, it would be completely good instead of a mixed good. Silently making changes to system settings is just creepy, even if the changes are good, and the user wouldn't otherwise have made the changes.
It's amusing seeing AOL have to jump in to compensate for MS' failings, in order to make their customes happy (and save on support costs).
I think that a better metaphore would be "What if you bought a house from a builder who assured you that it was secure, and kids broke into it on a daily basis, but when you complained to the builder be blamed you for not spending 1/2 your waking hours marching around your house nailing shut all of the doors that he installed and left unlocked."
Right. Regression tests are there to make sure that:
1) Bugs that you've fixed don't get reintroduced by later code changes,
2) The system runs across a matrix of operating systems, platforms, etc., and
3) if you write your regression tests before you code the app (yay XP!) they're how you know that you're done coding your app.
Depending on what you're coding, you'll almost certainly need to suppliment regression testing with other forms of testing. I find that throwing naive users at software is a great testing scheme -- they try things no experienced user would think of. And you get usability testing for free!
I'll second this -- Mozilla's automated regression testing across all platforms, backed by a planet full of testers logging bugs into bugzilla, is light years ahead of the testing methodologies used at most of the many product companies that I know of. Wonderful stuff, but astoundingly hard to get right. Most companies engineer products to the level of "good enough to ship" -- open source projects engineer to the level of "good enough to make the developers happy" which is usually a much higher level, because the project's "customers" are engineers who can read your source code. It's frightening releasing code open source, and that's a good thing. :-)
Let's draw an analogy to physical CD's. If you buy them in the US, you can then move abroad and play them. But you can't (legally) buy any more US-only CD's. Of course, with physical products the usual answer is to buy from a US mail order company, paying with a US credit card, then shipping abroad. It's a hassle, but not exactly a new issue. Try ordering (from the US) from amazon.co.uk and you run into the same issue.
:-)
If it makes you feel better, Apple did in fact allow they guy who complained about losing access to his music after moving to Canada to re-authorize his music. He can't buy any more from iTMS (darned contracts) but he didn't lose access to anything, other than for the time it took to wrestle with customer support, which I recall was a few days.
You make a good point, that DRM gives some degree control over stuff you've bought to the content owner (or store, etc.). In Apple's case, they only have control at the instant when you authorize your computer, so once you've got your music they'll leave you alone. Except apparently that if you move to a new machine you need to authorize it against an account with a US credit card. But they don't check permissions every time you play, or every time you boot, etc., which is what could allow them to revoce someone's license" so it's a fairly benign DRM scheme. Of course, if you're really concerned, burn everything to an audio CD after you buy it, and it's yours as long as you keep the disk. CD-R's are cheap.
Apple's also said that once you buy music it's yours, and that if you move, etc., they're not going to disable it. Pragmatically speaking, once your computer is authorized for your music, Apple never hears from it again, so there's no way that they could disable it. Even when you buy music, it doesn't affect the DRM, though they could decide that they can't sell you more music if you've moved to where they can't legally sell you music. But they can't disable your music (AFAIK) once it plays.
This is in contrast to some more "enthusiastic" DRM schemes (pretty much all of them) which check permissions on a per-file use, and can limit what actions you can take with your music. I've seen systems where you _can_ disable files on your computer whenever the content author wants. That's seriously creepy. So I agree with your basic point. I just don't think that Apple's DRM is a good example of that risk. Admittedly, Apple could modify their DRM software to be more intrusive, but so far they've acted with the consumer's interests in mind more than any other DRM vendor, so they don't worry me as much as others...
The post I replied to said that "The AHRA dictates that we have Fair Use copying rights, and some people are paying for that right in the form of surcharges." This isn't true -- the AHRA isn't charging anyone for exercising their fair use rights, it's compensating the record companies for the lost sales due to _illegal_ copying.
And the comparable law in Canada does (according to numerous posts on Slashdot and elsewhere) give consumers the right to make personal copies of music from CD's, which you could interpret (IANAL) to mean that in Canada you're paying higher fees on recordable media, but gain the right to make copies of music onto that media. The example people used in posts was that in Canada it's legal to check a CD out from a library (or borrow it from a friend) and burn a copy for personal use, which is not legal in the US.
"All DRM-locked forms of music distribution are a waste of money."
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.doc files have lasted longer than 5.25" floppy disks. :-)
While I'm not a fan of DRM for many of the reasons you mentioned, realistically you could burn your music to CD's, at which point it's as "eternal" as any other CD's. Which is to sat that you'll have to copy them onto whatever format replaces CD's, the way we went through LP's, 8-tracks, cassettes, MiniDisks, 45's,
It's entirely possible that AAC+FairPlay, as pure software, might be a longer lasting format than the CD medium. I know that
My understanding is that iTunes will RIP and play any format supported by QuickTime. QuickTime is extensible, so there are Ogg Vorbis and DivX codec's packaged for QT, for example.
Of course, you still can't play Ogg Vorbis on the iPod. But perhaps some day...
I use almost nothing but smart playlists, for two reasons. First, it can automatically create playlists based on ID3 tags, so I can listen to 1960's music, or high bitrate jazz, etc. Second, I have a 5 GB iPod and almost 30 GB of music, so I can use playlists to magically collect a subset to carry with me.
Some examples:
- 1 GB of My favorite music, based on how I rate it.
- 1 GB of Most played music, which iTunes counts automatically.
- 1 GB of most recently added music.
- all of my Purchased Music.
- all of my Audible audiobooks that are 'checked'. I can un-check them in iTunes once I've heard them, and they disappear from my iPod the next time I synch.
- 1 GB of Random Music, so that I hear a few things I haven't heard in a while.
Of course, you can still access the music by genre, etc., -- the playlists are a way to force those tracks into the iPod. I listen to 'favorites' and 'recently added' playlists all the time, though.
You're right -- that's what I get for simplifying. All of the major artists set up their own publishing house, but not all. And contracts these days give the labels the right to sell music digitally as well as on physical media, so over time the digital music services will get better and better inventories. Also, as musicians see the services start to sell real volumes of music (yay iTMS) hopefully they'll decide that it's worth pursuing.
"What I'm curious about is whether the export restriction is still in effect. One truly NASTY bit in the contract people discovered was that if you move outside of the US, as soon as Apple finds out (the next time you log into the service) it nukes every one of your files, and no refund. If you haven't burned them, you're screwed. A couple guys lost hundreds of dollars in music because of that."
Minor correction -- Apple won't "nuke" your files (and doesn't appear to check anything except when you authorize a machine, when you enter your username and password into iTunes), but if you change your billing address to be outside of the US they won't re-authorize your music. In the case that got some press a few months ago, the guy had his machine crash, did a full reinstall, and then couldn't re-authorize his music because his billing address wasn't in the US, so Apple couldn't legally sell him music. I think that he ended up getting taken care of by customer service.
The cause of this regional issue is that music is licensed by country or region, so the company that has the right to distribute a song in the US (and thus licensed music to iTMS for sale in the) US may not have the right to distribute it in, say, England. This means that to launch iTMS in each country, Apple has to renegotiate the licenses to the music. Kinda sucks.
While I certainly agree that iTunes is the best PC music service, MusicMatch's new system (launched a few weeks ago) is also surprisingly good. It's less polished, but it makes the generally annoying WMA format fairly usable, which is quite a feat.
OK, that's not much of a recommendation. But to put it in perspective, check out BuyMusic.com, where EVERY SINGLE TRACK can have different pricing and usage rules. Hideous.
Right, there are pretty obvious ways that you can work around all of the limitations in FairPlay (Apple's DRM). It's really just there to serve as a "speed bump" so that someone breaking the rules knows that's what they're doing.