"Octospiders" had 8 legs. But they definitely weren't in the first book, and in my opinion the series was all downhill from the time they showed up. Be that as it may, I also recall them having yellow and black tenticles or something? Anyway, I'd bet that the spider in the sketch is supposed to be a biot, but why it has 6 legs I couldn't tell you.
I once read that the Prime Minister of New Zealand was not informed when his intelligence service began collaborating with the NSA to intercept civilian communications. Do you believe that either Congress or the President ever really gets a clear picture of what goes on inside those agencies? If I were the NSA, I certainly wouldn't trust politicians with information that important (I'm not joking.) As to whistleblowing, you don't see an awful lot of it. It wasn't until agents of other collaborating intelligence services blew the whistle that we even heard of the NSA's international surveillance efforts. You still don't hear a lot of ex-NSA people blowing whistles about that (has there been a single one?) One could imagine if they were able to protect a secret like that (surveillance of internation communication isn't technically illegal), they could do an even better job hiding illegal activities?
And I was under the impression that a significant portion of the CIA and NSA's budget came from a single pool, to prevent it from being traced-- Congress could reduce the size of that pool, but they might have a hard time de-funding a particular agency or department.
The NSA maintains agreements with other countries' intelligence deptartments whereby we monitor their SIGINT and they monitor ours. Then they get together and share info. Technically, they're not exactly violating their charter... From what I understand, this is pretty common and is no great secret.
Were things really more "open and unprivate" in the bad-old-days? Seems to me you didn't have to worry about people receiving up-to-date records of your purchases, monitoring your private conversations, or easily discovering your past if you really wanted to hide it. Most of the guarantees we're now begging the government to give us really just restore privacies people used to take for granted.
If the violation is unintentional, there are also some small, capped, statutory damages.
How do you determine if the violation is intentional or unintentional? What if it's unintentional, but the result of gross negligence? It seems to me that one of the functions of punitive damages is to prevent this sort of negligence. Take away the statutory caps and I guarantee you'd see the error rates plummet-- despite the CRAs assertions to the contrary.
I suspect that the main reason that networks wouldn't want people to be able to record their content is the ability to cut out commercials.
Absolutely. I love fast-forwarding ads on my Tivo, I do it without exception. But I know none of this will work if Tivo gains widespread popularity. Some people say that the solution is to make more interesting commercials, but why would the industry chance it when they could instead take control of Tivo and every other VCR company-- which is exactly what this technology provides for. It gives the TV and movie industry absolute power over all hardware manufacturers. For their part, the hardware manufacturers aren't complaining, because the lucky companies who get a piece of the action are going to get very rich. Why do you think Tivo keeps such close ties to the TV-industry?
The crypto doesn't look that tough (56-bit keys) Like CSS, this will probably be more a legal solution than a technical one-- anyone who reverse-engineers the system, or distributes cracking software (even for legit reasons) will be taken to court.
Nuclear weapons have only been used twice in anger. Through the cold war (at least, from the time of this movie on), very few sane people ever thought of repeating the performance. So as terrifying as the threat of large-scale nuclear war was to us all, the probablilty of the actual occurence was near zero (barring an accident or unauthorized launch, both of which could still easily happen in today's "peaceful" world.) We've freed ourselves from the specter of deliberate global nuclear war, but now we have a world in which a second Hiroshima/Nagasaki is perhaps a certainty. Your point above is taken, but I'm not sure we've really made a very good trade.
I believe that a little-known feature of the FCRA (or other credit laws) limits the financial liability of a CRA, no matter how much their error costs you. In other words, even if you did get a lawyer, sue, and win, you probably wouldn't recover enough to cover your expenses. So there's absolutely no incentive for CRAs to get it right.
Did anyone else feel like the article was just badly written? I'm not passing judgement on his argument, just the way in which he went about stating it. The first few paragraphs glibly try to tie together several unrelated, or loosely related issues (i.e. the internet lets people amass more information, corporations are becoming more powerful, therefore the two are cause and effect), then immediately he's comparing corporate regulation to government regulation as though he'd already proven that the need for regulation was a given. I've never read his other work, and I'm not sure I want to, after seeing how sloppy this article was.
Please don't forget that the price of genetic sequencing is plummeting. In a few years (less than half the life of this patent, I'll bet), we'll be able to complete this sort of work for a tiny fraction of the millions of dollars this company spent. Now, I believe it's important that they recoup their investment, and that's why they should have a patent for the testing process. But what real benefit will we see from allowing gene patents? If this sort of patent is upheld, we (society) will wind up paying this company billions of dollars for performing what is essentially a few thousand dollars worth of genetic sequencing.
Many Starbucks already have 802.11 equipment connecting their super-cash-registers. All they need to implement this is a net connection. The question is, how does Microsoft get anything out of it? Will all of your web hits be intercepted and routed to MSN? Or do you have to install some ugly piece of Windows-only software in order to use the connection?
Bogus files don't replicate very well. As soon as I find out that file I downloaded is garbage, it's off my disk and nobody ever sees it again. To really mess things up, the record companies would have to put thousands of Napster/Gnutella clients out there. Then someone'll just add trust and security mechanisms to the system. It's not a winning battle for the RIAA. They don't have the resources, and it'd be bad PR.
Record companies tactics legal? Last I heard, the record companies were being sued for conspiring to inflate the price of CDs by witholding promotional money from retailers who offered lower-priced CDs. There's a reason you're paying $18 for that $.20 piece of plastic. And that's why I blame the record companies for the mess they've gotten themselves into. I just can't sympathize with them.
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"Octospiders" had 8 legs. But they definitely weren't in the first book, and in my opinion the series was all downhill from the time they showed up. Be that as it may, I also recall them having yellow and black tenticles or something? Anyway, I'd bet that the spider in the sketch is supposed to be a biot, but why it has 6 legs I couldn't tell you.
Morgan Freeman. Mutant sharks. Are you sure he can't go wrong?
And I was under the impression that a significant portion of the CIA and NSA's budget came from a single pool, to prevent it from being traced-- Congress could reduce the size of that pool, but they might have a hard time de-funding a particular agency or department.
The NSA maintains agreements with other countries' intelligence deptartments whereby we monitor their SIGINT and they monitor ours. Then they get together and share info. Technically, they're not exactly violating their charter... From what I understand, this is pretty common and is no great secret.
Were things really more "open and unprivate" in the bad-old-days? Seems to me you didn't have to worry about people receiving up-to-date records of your purchases, monitoring your private conversations, or easily discovering your past if you really wanted to hide it. Most of the guarantees we're now begging the government to give us really just restore privacies people used to take for granted.
How do you determine if the violation is intentional or unintentional? What if it's unintentional, but the result of gross negligence? It seems to me that one of the functions of punitive damages is to prevent this sort of negligence. Take away the statutory caps and I guarantee you'd see the error rates plummet-- despite the CRAs assertions to the contrary.
Absolutely. I love fast-forwarding ads on my Tivo, I do it without exception. But I know none of this will work if Tivo gains widespread popularity. Some people say that the solution is to make more interesting commercials, but why would the industry chance it when they could instead take control of Tivo and every other VCR company-- which is exactly what this technology provides for. It gives the TV and movie industry absolute power over all hardware manufacturers. For their part, the hardware manufacturers aren't complaining, because the lucky companies who get a piece of the action are going to get very rich. Why do you think Tivo keeps such close ties to the TV-industry?
The crypto doesn't look that tough (56-bit keys) Like CSS, this will probably be more a legal solution than a technical one-- anyone who reverse-engineers the system, or distributes cracking software (even for legit reasons) will be taken to court.
Nuclear weapons have only been used twice in anger. Through the cold war (at least, from the time of this movie on), very few sane people ever thought of repeating the performance. So as terrifying as the threat of large-scale nuclear war was to us all, the probablilty of the actual occurence was near zero (barring an accident or unauthorized launch, both of which could still easily happen in today's "peaceful" world.) We've freed ourselves from the specter of deliberate global nuclear war, but now we have a world in which a second Hiroshima/Nagasaki is perhaps a certainty. Your point above is taken, but I'm not sure we've really made a very good trade.
I believe that a little-known feature of the FCRA (or other credit laws) limits the financial liability of a CRA, no matter how much their error costs you. In other words, even if you did get a lawyer, sue, and win, you probably wouldn't recover enough to cover your expenses. So there's absolutely no incentive for CRAs to get it right.
Ack. That description just made Whistler look good.
Did anyone else feel like the article was just badly written? I'm not passing judgement on his argument, just the way in which he went about stating it. The first few paragraphs glibly try to tie together several unrelated, or loosely related issues (i.e. the internet lets people amass more information, corporations are becoming more powerful, therefore the two are cause and effect), then immediately he's comparing corporate regulation to government regulation as though he'd already proven that the need for regulation was a given. I've never read his other work, and I'm not sure I want to, after seeing how sloppy this article was.
Please don't forget that the price of genetic sequencing is plummeting. In a few years (less than half the life of this patent, I'll bet), we'll be able to complete this sort of work for a tiny fraction of the millions of dollars this company spent. Now, I believe it's important that they recoup their investment, and that's why they should have a patent for the testing process. But what real benefit will we see from allowing gene patents? If this sort of patent is upheld, we (society) will wind up paying this company billions of dollars for performing what is essentially a few thousand dollars worth of genetic sequencing.
Many Starbucks already have 802.11 equipment connecting their super-cash-registers. All they need to implement this is a net connection. The question is, how does Microsoft get anything out of it? Will all of your web hits be intercepted and routed to MSN? Or do you have to install some ugly piece of Windows-only software in order to use the connection?
Bogus files don't replicate very well. As soon as I find out that file I downloaded is garbage, it's off my disk and nobody ever sees it again. To really mess things up, the record companies would have to put thousands of Napster/Gnutella clients out there. Then someone'll just add trust and security mechanisms to the system. It's not a winning battle for the RIAA. They don't have the resources, and it'd be bad PR.
Record companies tactics legal? Last I heard, the record companies were being sued for conspiring to inflate the price of CDs by witholding promotional money from retailers who offered lower-priced CDs. There's a reason you're paying $18 for that $.20 piece of plastic. And that's why I blame the record companies for the mess they've gotten themselves into. I just can't sympathize with them.