Blaming parents, especially when you aren't one, for not being aware of all this, is an easy out, but not a productive one. The providers of chat rooms DO share a responsibility for safety. Yes, age restrictions can be bypassed, but it will help. Not all kids are liars. And, for good or ill, Spitzer is very good at increasing awareness of wrongdoing, in many areas. That increased awareness will also help.
Age restrictions won't help, and it doesn't matter that the kids aren't liers. As you said, chatting is a way of life for these kids. If Yahoo bans them then some of them will lie and keep using it anyway, and the rest will just go somewhere else. If the providers only lets kids talk to kids, then the predators will lie about their age. You are talking about being productive - name one productive way that Yahoo can prevent this from happening. If local kids have a hard time telling the difference between another local kid and a predator, then you can't expect Yahoo to - especially since it will have to be done using scripts and spot checks.
These service providers have the responsibility to report any illegal/dangerous activity that they know about, to keep an eye out for obvious offences, and to cooperate with the authorities in dealing with those cases. And they are already doing this. But they are simply incapable of doing anything to police or prevent the vast majority of problems.
Focusing on blaming people is rarely productive, so it is no surprise that it isn't productive in this case either. But the truth is that while it isn't easy to keep track of what your kids are doing, parents still have far more ability to do so than Yahoo. The productive thing to do is to educate the parents, not rely on the false hope that Yahoo can do anything to help.
With this kind of organizations in control, I'd be happy to get a Europe-wide agency as it can't get _any_ worse than it is now and at least I'd be more likely to get a good selection of music to the local iTunes store.
One would hope so, but it seems that the EU's approach to unifying law across the EU is to take all the most pro-business, anti-consumer laws that the members currently have and apply them to the entire union. You can say the same for the WTO.
How is an encumbered DVD, with its CSS DRM that you can bypass with DeCSS, different from Apple's AVC (H.264) with FairPlay DRM, which can be similarly bypassed?
If you are resigned to having to break the law, then No, there is no difference. Heck, by that metric all DRM is acceptable because it is all breakable. But, in my opinion, accepting DRM just because you know you can get around it by breaking the law is foolish. Why support companies who may turn around and sue you? If the terms of the DRM are acceptable to me, then I will buy the product and use it according to the terms. If they are not then I will have nothing to do with the company whatsoever. Given that, these two DRM schemes are very different because they have very different terms.
First off is how the DRM is licensed. CSS is licensed to any manufacturer who wants to use it for a flat "Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory" fee. FairPlay on the other hand is only licensed to companies that Apple chooses to license it to, and so far they have been extremely reluctant to license it to anyone at all. There are dozens of companies that I can buy a DVD player from. There is exactly one that I can get a FairPlay protected movie player from.
Secondly is how devices are authorized. With CSS it is the manufacturer who is being authorized. Any device the produce is therefore authorized out of the factory and is not particular to me. With FairPlay it is the user who must be authorized, and thus each of my devices must be authorized online with Apple, and will only play my songs. I can resell my DVDs, I can't resell my FairPlay protected movies. Even if DVD players stop being produced altogether, then I can still buy used DVD players. If Apple goes out of business then buying a used player won't help me play any of my protected movies, because I can't get the player authorized.
Lastly, DVD is simply more widespread than FairPlay H.264. I know that DVD is going to be around for years to come, whereas FairPlay H.264 might take off, but it might go the way of BetaMax. Plenty of products fail - it's just part of business but DRM has greatly increased the risk to early adopters.
So seeing as how the longevity of my media is most important to me, then DVDs are a much better bet at this point compared buying stuff off iTunes.
As for the other points. Doubting the longevity of a brand new video scheme is not a "post apocalyptic fantasy":) Sure, by now FairPlay AAC is widespread that enough that even in the worse case scenario, there would be enough angry people that something will be done to allow them to play their music. But this is still new, and it is too early to see what will become of it. As far as portables go, I have no desire to watch movies on a screen that is smaller than the physical DVD itself, so re-encoding to copy onto a small device isn't a concern for me. WMA is no worse than FairPlay, if you choose a decent service. Being equally bad I won't use either - especially as long as better options are still around.
Which comes to the root of my dissent - all the DRM apologetic arguments boil down to stating that 'it isn't that much worse than what we have now', or 'it's not as bad as it could be'. But that doesn't change the fact that it is still worse:) I have no interest in change for the worse. I'll keep using what I'm using until something better comes along.
There is an error in the website - the bottom row of quarks is not correct. The pdf version of the site shows the correct models.
I spent forever staring at those incorrect models trying to make sense of them, before realizing that top and down were the same, and that something must be wrong:)
Yeah that price point is perfect for TV shows. On par with TV series DVDs where you can get a season for $30, a while after the initial release. Much better than many of the Anime studios that try and charge you over $5 an episode years after it has been released.
On the negative side, the DRM is the same as the thier music files, and is unacceptable to me. This is just because when I purchase something to put into my library I want it to last. I don't know where Apple and their proprietary DRM is going to be in 20 years. I don't know if I will be able to find devices to play it with. I don't know if I will be able to legaly transfer it to another format, and even if I did it would certainly loose quality do to the nature of lossy encoding.
So I think I will stay with DVD's for anything I want to purchase. While encumbered, the DRM is at least a wide spread industry standard if not an open one, and is licenced under a RAND policy not a proprietary one. I am sure I'll be able to find DVD players for years to come.
That said, the price point is low enough to where it is almost reasonable to buy media instead of renting it. And looking at it from the point of a rental, I don't have as big of a problem with DRM - the only problem is the proprietary nature creates vendor lock-in, I can't choose from dozens of players. It will be interesting to see what direction(s) the media markets move in. I have always assumed that a subscription system would rule IPTV, which would require even more lock-in and DRM to insure that you are only renting, not keeping the movies. But if the companies are truely enlightened enough to keep purchase prices down low enough, it could make the concept of rental obsolete. That is a really appealing idea - set the prices low enough that purchases would be far more impulsive and frequent.
Well it depends on the religion. For the ones that accept evolution, then this is just another of God's creation, part of his master plan. Of the christians that reject evolution, most of them reject the scientific validity of the other pre-human hominids that have been discovered (Sally, etc). They assert that they are just odd humans (diseased or otherwise), and not a "missing link" or seperate species. I am sure that they feel the same about this discovery.
So far it doesn't appear to be a human. The shape of the skull doesn't match that of any known pygmy, dwarf, midget or diseased human. It is far more simular to Homo erectus than Homo sapian. The time range over which they appear to have existed also suggests that they evolved from Homo erectus, not from Homo sapian (although the two may have co-existed latter on).
Of course there is still a ton more to be studied, such as DNA, and so this is certainly not a closed case by any means. But so far it is different from anything else we have seen - different enough that it is tenatively being concidered a seperate species.
Man I wish I didn't use up all my mod point this morning - this story (like the last one posted) could really use them.
This is about ICANN - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It is in charge of the dissemination of domain names and IP addresses. Things have to have identifiers - you can't get information from another computer, unless you have some way of finding that computer and initiating communication. That is why every computer on the internet must have an address, and they must be unique (even NAT'd computers: IP + Port gives a unique address of how to reach the computer you want). To insure this uniqueness the process of assigning and publishing these addresses is centralized. People have suggested ways to change this but all the suggestions suck. So no, the internet is not this amorphous decentralized thing that people make it out to be. In fact most things about it are more hierarchical than web-like in distribution, but there is just enough redundancy that it is fairly fault proof.
On the the real issue. For years, this job has been done by the ICANN, which is an international private non-profit corporation, and save for a few annoyances, it has worked out fine and well. However, ICANN is operating under contract from the US government (I forget the exact department) with the knowledge that if ICANN misbehaves the government will slap them back into line. Thus far, the government has not had to do this, and has wisely been almost entirely hands off. Even when ICANN refused to give the IQ domain name to the provisional government in Iraq, the government did not use it's position over ICANN put any particular pressure on them.
The looming question though is what the US government considers misbehaving. This isn't spelled out anywhere for the most part. So far the government has played nice - but who's to say what they will do in the future. Many people therefore want a more international body to be the final say over ICANN (or its equivalent), but their proposals are all as equally vague as the US's policy.
So the world politicians are untrusting of the US, for fear that they may change their hands-off policy, especially with our increasingly unilateral behavior. Therefore, they want ultimate say over the internet, whatever that means. Likewise the US and a large portion of the technical community are untrusting of the UN, because some of them see the UN as incompentant or corrupt, and because European technical regulators are far more politicized on heavy-handed than their US counterparts, and also because more totalitarian governments are on the front line of the push. So we don't want to hand over control to a new party, when the current arrangement is working just fine.
In short, since neither side has managed to spell out what it actually wants, it has just turned into a big ideological mess. What they need to do is table the discussion on who will run the internet and start talking about how the internet should be run. Each side should think of all the things that they are worried about if the other has control, and then sit down and write policy that alleviates these concerns. But until it is determined what power the "Head of the Internet" has, and more importantly what powers it does not have, then nothing productive can happen. It will continue to generate a bunch of "we created it - we run it" and "you guys think you rule the world but you don't" gargbage - just like on slashdot.
The "There are 20 law makers currently supporting the bill" link in the summary is incorrect. The twenty Senators listed on that site are the ones in the Commerce Commitee who will be voting on the Senate version of the DTV bill, and may or may not support the broadcast flag.
This article, however, was about a new push to get the Brodcast flag added to the DTV bill in the HouseCommittee on Energy and Commerce , in particular in the Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee . The way that legislation works now-a-days is that there is rarely an opportunity to get a bill ammended when it goes before congress. All the formulation and ammending of bills happens in committee, and then the house and senate usually just give it an up or down vote without any modifications (but after a great deal of grand-standing). So these are the people who have the most influence on the final wording of the House version of the DTV bill. If you have representatives from your state in this committee you should definiately write them. Even if you don't it won't hurt to pick someone from the subcommittee and write them anyway.
The representatives listed by Mad Rain, above, is the correct list of supporting representatives - 20 of the 57 members of the House Commerce Committee. If they are in you district, they are the people you should writing letters of disgust, and let them know you will be voting against them in the next election.
In addition if your Senator is on the Senate Commerce Committee and you haven't written them yet on the broadcast flag, then you should, as they will be dealing with this issue as well.
Lastly if your senators and representatives are not on any of these committees you should write them anyway in case the bill makes it out of committee. Since we dont know an exact number for this bill yet, it helps if you know in what capacity they will be working with the bill, to help them identify what bill you are talking about. Keywords - Digital Television Bill, Broadcast Flag, Commerce Committee.
If you don't like it, don't buy it in the first place.
I know and I don't plan on buying any of these new devices, but that really doesn't solve anything.
The "If you don't like it, don't buy it" philosophy would be fine in a free market, but we don't have a free market. We live in a market dominated by the MPAA, who has nearly full say in the crafting the laws that govern how the market works.
The big movie studios will eventually release all their material in these new formats, so everyone else will buy equipment that will support all the restrictions required to view the media. Then the few good movies that I do want to see / own will also be released in these formats because they are standards, and because that is what everyone has equipment for. Just look at CSS - even indepentant movies are released on DVD, and most of them are encrypted because that is just how things are done and most of the producers don't know or care enough about the issue to go out of their way to get a DVD made without it.
I'm tired of the cartels having full say in what direction the industry goes, and then giving us the "choice" of thier way or the highway. I'm tired of being given the "choice" of new competing ideas each of which entail less rights than I already have now. It probably won't be long before the broadcast flag law is passed mandating some DRM, and I won't even have an illusion of a choice any more.
I'm tired of being treated like a criminal. Has it really gotten so bad that can't be trusted to watch a movie without supervision because I might break the law? Don't you see how rediculous that is? There has to be a certain amount of trust in a free society.
You are overestimating the extent to which security people will follow procedure in order to cover their asses. There have been multiple times where I have been singled out for screening for stupid reasons, and the security people knew it. However, they didn't want to be the ones that broke procedure and let someone talk them into skipping the in-depth search. Like the time where a flight was canceled and everyone was given one-way tickets on other flights. The computer marked the one-way tickets as high risk (as normal), so everyone who got moved off that flight had to go through the full search. Stupid, but the guards know thier job isn't to think - they get fired for that.
Furthermore, even at a high level, what are they supposed to do? Let everyone through? Ground all flights leaving the airport until everything is decontaminated, or the source is found? I would assume that if someone did this as a means of concealing a device, then he would make the contaminated as high as the detectable level that he was carring.
We here doing out jobs, trying to debunk these silly rumors, and everytime you have to come out and actually deliver on them. What is the world coming to? If you were any other company, these rumors would come to nothing. But no, not with the almighty google.
How is an honest sceptic supposed to make a living now-a-days?
That is a bad analogy. Supposing that the breast implants did cause health concerns - then the defect was general to everyone who had them implanted - everyone was equally likely to become a victim. If Microsoft was being sued over a bug that affected a core feature of the OS, that too would equally applied to everyone who purchased the system. They would all be equally vulnerable, regardless of whether they happened to encountered the bug yet or not. But since the bug was limited to a feature that only a small group of people used, then only that small group of people was at risk. The courts could require them to make that particular feature availiable to all the customers who requested it, since it was advertized to work in 6.0, but Microsoft shouldn't have to pay damages to people who never intended to use the feature to begin with.
It is hard to tell from just that article whether they were suing for damages (usually the case in class-action) or just a free upgrade, or whether the judge broke up the class because it contained people who where not injured, or because it contained people who were not at risk to be injured. This could very well be a situation where the plaintiffs lawyers would have had a good case, but they got greedy and filed overreaching complaints. Without knowing more details of the case it is impossible to say.
The best approach I have seen for technologies like this was where they opened up the market to the rich countries, but you had to pay for two - you keep one and the other gets donated to someone in a poor country.
DRM is the compromise the consumer makes to have available to them a quality digital version of a work. Without DRM, there is no incentive for the artist to provide the digital version, as DRM'less digital versions can be immediately redistributed.
If there is no incentive without DRM then there should also be no incentive with it. Because DRM is a myth.
DRM only restricts people who own legally obtained copies from using them in non-approved manners. It can do nothing to prevent people with illegally obtained copies from using or distributing the work. Furthermore, it can do nothing to prevent people who have legally obtained copies from converting them to non-DRM form.
This is because unbreakable DRM is theoretically impossible. Every DRM scheme ever created has been broken shortly after it became widely used, and once a single person breaks the DRM on a work then you are back to where you started.
Therefore, the restrictions enforced by DRM are inherently limited to those who chose to obey the law to begin with, while it is no barrier those who choose to infringe on copyright.
DRM is compromise - a compromise where the consumer agrees to give up his fair-use rights, the electronic companies agree to complicate thier products, and in return none of the parties, media producer included, get anything of value in return.
Sorry, but that is not the kind of compromise that I want to make.
Funny, as soon as I loaded slashdot today, my first thought was that something looks different - they must have switched over to CSS. Sure enough scrolled down and here is the story. The font size is one difference. On my machine the headers look bigger than they used to, others have said the font looks smaller, which is to expected when you go from fixed font sizes to relative, and is a good thing. Also, in the new code the [Reply to This] and [Parent] links are now the same size as the comment text, whereas they used to be one size smaller. I think the "N Replies beneath your current threshold" also used to be smaller.
Another one that really jumps out at me is that there is more space around the text in the comment headers, than there used to be. This is true in both Firefox and IE.
I'll have to check out the CSS when I get off of work.
For a start it looks as if unmanned missions could achieve the same at far less cost.
Well that depends on what these missions are intended to acheive. An unmanned mission can never acheive the task of creating a sustainable human settlement in space.
From everthing I have seen that's what the moon missions are. They are not primarily exporation - we've been there, done that. They are not primarily science, our unmanned probes are doing a fine job of that. They are looking somewhat at how to use the resources on the moon, but I strongly doubt that it will ever be economical to harvest them for use on earth - use on the moon by settlers is another story. In all the announcements, they have made a point to state that this time we are going back to stay - after a few preliminary missions, we will be leaving astronauts up there for months, turning into years on end.
I was originally very sceptical of Bush's back to the moon vision, but NASA has turned it into something good. We will soon have an inexpensive set of crafts capable of replacing (heck exceding) the shuttle, and we have a marked shift in the goal of the manned space program from science (better done by unmanned) to settlement. Which, IMHO, is the entire reason that humans should be in space at all. All with only a minor increase in the budget. I am very excited by all this.
I agree with Daniel's post, there is some computer research that does develop significant new advances. The reason that the vast majority of software patents are garbage is not because software research yields less good results than biotech research but because the patent office allows people to patent what they are doing, not how they are doing it (and also because there is no practical, objective way to determine the non-obviousness of an invention).
But even in the cases where computer research does result in legitimate advancement in the field, I am not at all convinced that granting a monopoly helps the "advancement of arts and science" when it comes to the computer industry. Video codecs are an excellent example of work that does require a good deal of research, and thus fit the traditional criteria of being useful, novel, and non-obvious.
However, what been the effect of codec patents on the industry? It has devolved the standardization process into a political battle where all parties involved are just trying to get their patented technology included, so that they can get their part of the royalty pie. It has significantly increased the cost of video encoding, and the lack of a truly open standard has complicated the task of getting video to people in a format they can play. Worse, the patents are increasingly being used not to protect their invention, but to force certain behavior on the rest of the industry, by refusing to license patents on "standard" formats to groups that do not comply (for example if they don't implement DRM).
As for the benefits of patents, I have a very hard time believing that someone somewhere would not have developed quality codecs in the absence of patents. Many of the encoding techniques developed were started by researchers in Universities who then moved onto industry where they refined their ideas. The effect of industry may have initially been to accelerated codec development through funding research. However, in the long term it appears to have also hindered it by locking the results up in patents, thus limiting the ability of researchers to collaborate and improve upon existing designs.
So all in all, the evidence that codec patents helped the industry is fairly weak, while it has definitely hindered the industry.
As for the merit of biotech patents, well the entire economic model of the medical field in this country is a mess. I am only beginning to wrap my head around what the sources of the problems are, and am in no position to give suggestions as to how to improve it.
Bah, my pets were never that well-behaved. Bringing the frisbee back to you after you threw it - what is the fun in that? No, with my dogs you had to chase them down and pry it out of their mouths, while defending from the other dogs that were also trying to get at it. It made for some awesome games of base^H^H^H^Hcalvin ball.
Which brings me to the question of why these role playing games never include any decent side games. From everything I have talked to this game has the pet-owner emotional attachment parts down to a tee, but then you have all the boring things, that you would have in real life. I guess it has the redeeming factor of teaching kids responsibility, but as an adult I have enough of that, so it just comes acrossed as meaningless busy work - the infamous grind. Why not make the contests where you earn money more fun mini-games?
If you look at the old Atari games, most of them were nothing but mini games, and they fun. Now you have all these MMORPGs, where advancement and community is the entertaining aspect of the game, while the things you do to advance are dull, dull, dull. Something that Nintendo does very well in nearly all their games is combining fun gameplay with the opportunity for advancement (new things to unlock). I am still waiting for someone to create a MMORPG, take a cue from the old Atari games and newer games like Super Monkeyball, Mario Party, and approach the advancement tasks like they were mini-games that are fun to play in and of themselves. They would have to do a little more work to integrate them into the game (for immersion and all that), preferably happening in the same world. For example, being in a race should be implemented more like vehicles in FPS, rather than like Mario party where map screen and game screens are completely different. They would also have to include multiplayer coop games for the community aspects, and have different characters classes and stats would result in diffent advantages in the games. If anyone ever did this, it would be pure crack.
First off, you are not forced to get a new monitor unless you want to play HDCP content at full resolution. Most home users won't upgrade the OS until they get a new computer, and thus won't care. Most corporate customers don't care about HDCP.
Furthermore, if you do want to play HDCP content legally you either need an HDCP compliant monitor or HDCP compliant software which will degrade the video. Yes this applies to Windows, but it also applies to Linux, Mac OS X, and any other OS or stand-alone device that plays HDCP content.
While individual users (and some non-USians) can go ahead an use an illegal implementation, this is not an option for the corporate and educational markets that Novell targets. So linux has no advantage over Windows whatsoever in this regard.
That's all well and good, but people, we are already DECADES behind on this problem. Whether you like it or not, there's a boatload of Word95/Excel/BMP/etc files out there (and worse).
Tell me about it. It would take more fingers than I have just to count all the proprietary formats we have for engineering drawings around here:) Sorry if I came across as trivializing your work, I definitely didn't mean to do so. Good luck, and hopefully the job will get easier in the future and not worse.
I have been saying for years that the DoD should make an initiative to move towards open standards for this exact reason. The document retention requirements they have are incredible, and yet nearly all the documents generated are saved in proprietary formats. Now with the OASIS (OpenDoc) format solidifying and there is more than one implementation of it, they wouldn't even have to define a standard for word processing or spreadsheets.
Obviously, open standards are not a panacea. There are countless standards created by the military that never really spread farther than that, and therefore the support for them is limited (and thus companies that do support it can charge a pretty penny for it). And with open standards, at it is much easier to write an implementation if you need to. Compare this to MS Word, which is a pain to reverse engineer now, just imagine having to do so in the distant future, when it is not as widespread. And of course, for the very long term, nothing is more certain (and more inconvenient) than printing everything out and storing it in a warehouse, which is what is done now. But the longer that can be postponed, the more money can be saved.
As an added bonus, just imagine the competition that would spring up in the word processor market, if the DoD mandated that all new word processor documents generated internally or by contractors be in OASIS format, starting 5-10 years from now. Microsoft would have to support it (and well) or throw away a huge number of Office sales. The DoD would no longer be locked into a single vendor, saving them money upfront in addition to the money they saved on document retention.
Until then, the best plan is likely to convert as much as possible to a few standards like PDF, which is what I expect will happen here.
Slashdot Mirror
Blaming parents, especially when you aren't one, for not being aware of all this, is an easy out, but not a productive one. The providers of chat rooms DO share a responsibility for safety. Yes, age restrictions can be bypassed, but it will help. Not all kids are liars. And, for good or ill, Spitzer is very good at increasing awareness of wrongdoing, in many areas. That increased awareness will also help.
Age restrictions won't help, and it doesn't matter that the kids aren't liers. As you said, chatting is a way of life for these kids. If Yahoo bans them then some of them will lie and keep using it anyway, and the rest will just go somewhere else. If the providers only lets kids talk to kids, then the predators will lie about their age. You are talking about being productive - name one productive way that Yahoo can prevent this from happening. If local kids have a hard time telling the difference between another local kid and a predator, then you can't expect Yahoo to - especially since it will have to be done using scripts and spot checks.
These service providers have the responsibility to report any illegal/dangerous activity that they know about, to keep an eye out for obvious offences, and to cooperate with the authorities in dealing with those cases. And they are already doing this. But they are simply incapable of doing anything to police or prevent the vast majority of problems.
Focusing on blaming people is rarely productive, so it is no surprise that it isn't productive in this case either. But the truth is that while it isn't easy to keep track of what your kids are doing, parents still have far more ability to do so than Yahoo. The productive thing to do is to educate the parents, not rely on the false hope that Yahoo can do anything to help.
cheers
With this kind of organizations in control, I'd be happy to get a Europe-wide agency as it can't get _any_ worse than it is now and at least I'd be more likely to get a good selection of music to the local iTunes store.
One would hope so, but it seems that the EU's approach to unifying law across the EU is to take all the most pro-business, anti-consumer laws that the members currently have and apply them to the entire union. You can say the same for the WTO.
How is an encumbered DVD, with its CSS DRM that you can bypass with DeCSS, different from Apple's AVC (H.264) with FairPlay DRM, which can be similarly bypassed?
:) I have no interest in change for the worse. I'll keep using what I'm using until something better comes along.
If you are resigned to having to break the law, then No, there is no difference. Heck, by that metric all DRM is acceptable because it is all breakable. But, in my opinion, accepting DRM just because you know you can get around it by breaking the law is foolish. Why support companies who may turn around and sue you? If the terms of the DRM are acceptable to me, then I will buy the product and use it according to the terms. If they are not then I will have nothing to do with the company whatsoever. Given that, these two DRM schemes are very different because they have very different terms.
First off is how the DRM is licensed. CSS is licensed to any manufacturer who wants to use it for a flat "Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory" fee. FairPlay on the other hand is only licensed to companies that Apple chooses to license it to, and so far they have been extremely reluctant to license it to anyone at all. There are dozens of companies that I can buy a DVD player from. There is exactly one that I can get a FairPlay protected movie player from.
Secondly is how devices are authorized. With CSS it is the manufacturer who is being authorized. Any device the produce is therefore authorized out of the factory and is not particular to me. With FairPlay it is the user who must be authorized, and thus each of my devices must be authorized online with Apple, and will only play my songs. I can resell my DVDs, I can't resell my FairPlay protected movies. Even if DVD players stop being produced altogether, then I can still buy used DVD players. If Apple goes out of business then buying a used player won't help me play any of my protected movies, because I can't get the player authorized.
Lastly, DVD is simply more widespread than FairPlay H.264. I know that DVD is going to be around for years to come, whereas FairPlay H.264 might take off, but it might go the way of BetaMax. Plenty of products fail - it's just part of business but DRM has greatly increased the risk to early adopters.
So seeing as how the longevity of my media is most important to me, then DVDs are a much better bet at this point compared buying stuff off iTunes.
As for the other points. Doubting the longevity of a brand new video scheme is not a "post apocalyptic fantasy":) Sure, by now FairPlay AAC is widespread that enough that even in the worse case scenario, there would be enough angry people that something will be done to allow them to play their music. But this is still new, and it is too early to see what will become of it. As far as portables go, I have no desire to watch movies on a screen that is smaller than the physical DVD itself, so re-encoding to copy onto a small device isn't a concern for me. WMA is no worse than FairPlay, if you choose a decent service. Being equally bad I won't use either - especially as long as better options are still around.
Which comes to the root of my dissent - all the DRM apologetic arguments boil down to stating that 'it isn't that much worse than what we have now', or 'it's not as bad as it could be'. But that doesn't change the fact that it is still worse
cheers
There is an error in the website - the bottom row of quarks is not correct.
:)
The pdf version of the site shows the correct models.
I spent forever staring at those incorrect models trying to make sense of them, before realizing that top and down were the same, and that something must be wrong
Yeah that price point is perfect for TV shows. On par with TV series DVDs where you can get a season for $30, a while after the initial release. Much better than many of the Anime studios that try and charge you over $5 an episode years after it has been released.
On the negative side, the DRM is the same as the thier music files, and is unacceptable to me. This is just because when I purchase something to put into my library I want it to last. I don't know where Apple and their proprietary DRM is going to be in 20 years. I don't know if I will be able to find devices to play it with. I don't know if I will be able to legaly transfer it to another format, and even if I did it would certainly loose quality do to the nature of lossy encoding.
So I think I will stay with DVD's for anything I want to purchase. While encumbered, the DRM is at least a wide spread industry standard if not an open one, and is licenced under a RAND policy not a proprietary one. I am sure I'll be able to find DVD players for years to come.
That said, the price point is low enough to where it is almost reasonable to buy media instead of renting it. And looking at it from the point of a rental, I don't have as big of a problem with DRM - the only problem is the proprietary nature creates vendor lock-in, I can't choose from dozens of players. It will be interesting to see what direction(s) the media markets move in. I have always assumed that a subscription system would rule IPTV, which would require even more lock-in and DRM to insure that you are only renting, not keeping the movies. But if the companies are truely enlightened enough to keep purchase prices down low enough, it could make the concept of rental obsolete. That is a really appealing idea - set the prices low enough that purchases would be far more impulsive and frequent.
I so want an iPhone with rotary dialing.
That would totally rock my retro-chic world.
Well it depends on the religion. For the ones that accept evolution, then this is just another of God's creation, part of his master plan. Of the christians that reject evolution, most of them reject the scientific validity of the other pre-human hominids that have been discovered (Sally, etc). They assert that they are just odd humans (diseased or otherwise), and not a "missing link" or seperate species. I am sure that they feel the same about this discovery.
So far it doesn't appear to be a human. The shape of the skull doesn't match that of any known pygmy, dwarf, midget or diseased human. It is far more simular to Homo erectus than Homo sapian. The time range over which they appear to have existed also suggests that they evolved from Homo erectus, not from Homo sapian (although the two may have co-existed latter on).
Of course there is still a ton more to be studied, such as DNA, and so this is certainly not a closed case by any means. But so far it is different from anything else we have seen - different enough that it is tenatively being concidered a seperate species.
Man I wish I didn't use up all my mod point this morning - this story (like the last one posted) could really use them.
This is about ICANN - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It is in charge of the dissemination of domain names and IP addresses. Things have to have identifiers - you can't get information from another computer, unless you have some way of finding that computer and initiating communication. That is why every computer on the internet must have an address, and they must be unique (even NAT'd computers: IP + Port gives a unique address of how to reach the computer you want). To insure this uniqueness the process of assigning and publishing these addresses is centralized. People have suggested ways to change this but all the suggestions suck. So no, the internet is not this amorphous decentralized thing that people make it out to be. In fact most things about it are more hierarchical than web-like in distribution, but there is just enough redundancy that it is fairly fault proof.
On the the real issue. For years, this job has been done by the ICANN, which is an international private non-profit corporation, and save for a few annoyances, it has worked out fine and well. However, ICANN is operating under contract from the US government (I forget the exact department) with the knowledge that if ICANN misbehaves the government will slap them back into line. Thus far, the government has not had to do this, and has wisely been almost entirely hands off. Even when ICANN refused to give the IQ domain name to the provisional government in Iraq, the government did not use it's position over ICANN put any particular pressure on them.
The looming question though is what the US government considers misbehaving. This isn't spelled out anywhere for the most part. So far the government has played nice - but who's to say what they will do in the future. Many people therefore want a more international body to be the final say over ICANN (or its equivalent), but their proposals are all as equally vague as the US's policy.
So the world politicians are untrusting of the US, for fear that they may change their hands-off policy, especially with our increasingly unilateral behavior. Therefore, they want ultimate say over the internet, whatever that means. Likewise the US and a large portion of the technical community are untrusting of the UN, because some of them see the UN as incompentant or corrupt, and because European technical regulators are far more politicized on heavy-handed than their US counterparts, and also because more totalitarian governments are on the front line of the push. So we don't want to hand over control to a new party, when the current arrangement is working just fine.
In short, since neither side has managed to spell out what it actually wants, it has just turned into a big ideological mess. What they need to do is table the discussion on who will run the internet and start talking about how the internet should be run. Each side should think of all the things that they are worried about if the other has control, and then sit down and write policy that alleviates these concerns. But until it is determined what power the "Head of the Internet" has, and more importantly what powers it does not have, then nothing productive can happen. It will continue to generate a bunch of "we created it - we run it" and "you guys think you rule the world but you don't" gargbage - just like on slashdot.
The "There are 20 law makers currently supporting the bill" link in the summary is incorrect. The twenty Senators listed on that site are the ones in the Commerce Commitee who will be voting on the Senate version of the DTV bill, and may or may not support the broadcast flag.
This article, however, was about a new push to get the Brodcast flag added to the DTV bill in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce , in particular in the Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee . The way that legislation works now-a-days is that there is rarely an opportunity to get a bill ammended when it goes before congress. All the formulation and ammending of bills happens in committee, and then the house and senate usually just give it an up or down vote without any modifications (but after a great deal of grand-standing). So these are the people who have the most influence on the final wording of the House version of the DTV bill. If you have representatives from your state in this committee you should definiately write them. Even if you don't it won't hurt to pick someone from the subcommittee and write them anyway.
The representatives listed by Mad Rain, above, is the correct list of supporting representatives - 20 of the 57 members of the House Commerce Committee. If they are in you district, they are the people you should writing letters of disgust, and let them know you will be voting against them in the next election.
In addition if your Senator is on the Senate Commerce Committee and you haven't written them yet on the broadcast flag, then you should, as they will be dealing with this issue as well.
Lastly if your senators and representatives are not on any of these committees you should write them anyway in case the bill makes it out of committee. Since we dont know an exact number for this bill yet, it helps if you know in what capacity they will be working with the bill, to help them identify what bill you are talking about. Keywords - Digital Television Bill, Broadcast Flag, Commerce Committee.
If you don't like it, don't buy it in the first place.
I know and I don't plan on buying any of these new devices, but that really doesn't solve anything.
The "If you don't like it, don't buy it" philosophy would be fine in a free market, but we don't have a free market. We live in a market dominated by the MPAA, who has nearly full say in the crafting the laws that govern how the market works.
The big movie studios will eventually release all their material in these new formats, so everyone else will buy equipment that will support all the restrictions required to view the media. Then the few good movies that I do want to see / own will also be released in these formats because they are standards, and because that is what everyone has equipment for. Just look at CSS - even indepentant movies are released on DVD, and most of them are encrypted because that is just how things are done and most of the producers don't know or care enough about the issue to go out of their way to get a DVD made without it.
I'm tired of the cartels having full say in what direction the industry goes, and then giving us the "choice" of thier way or the highway. I'm tired of being given the "choice" of new competing ideas each of which entail less rights than I already have now. It probably won't be long before the broadcast flag law is passed mandating some DRM, and I won't even have an illusion of a choice any more.
I'm tired of being treated like a criminal. Has it really gotten so bad that can't be trusted to watch a movie without supervision because I might break the law? Don't you see how rediculous that is? There has to be a certain amount of trust in a free society.
You are overestimating the extent to which security people will follow procedure in order to cover their asses. There have been multiple times where I have been singled out for screening for stupid reasons, and the security people knew it. However, they didn't want to be the ones that broke procedure and let someone talk them into skipping the in-depth search. Like the time where a flight was canceled and everyone was given one-way tickets on other flights. The computer marked the one-way tickets as high risk (as normal), so everyone who got moved off that flight had to go through the full search. Stupid, but the guards know thier job isn't to think - they get fired for that.
Furthermore, even at a high level, what are they supposed to do? Let everyone through? Ground all flights leaving the airport until everything is decontaminated, or the source is found? I would assume that if someone did this as a means of concealing a device, then he would make the contaminated as high as the detectable level that he was carring.
We here doing out jobs, trying to debunk these silly rumors, and everytime you have to come out and actually deliver on them. What is the world coming to? If you were any other company, these rumors would come to nothing. But no, not with the almighty google.
How is an honest sceptic supposed to make a living now-a-days?
That is a bad analogy. Supposing that the breast implants did cause health concerns - then the defect was general to everyone who had them implanted - everyone was equally likely to become a victim. If Microsoft was being sued over a bug that affected a core feature of the OS, that too would equally applied to everyone who purchased the system. They would all be equally vulnerable, regardless of whether they happened to encountered the bug yet or not. But since the bug was limited to a feature that only a small group of people used, then only that small group of people was at risk. The courts could require them to make that particular feature availiable to all the customers who requested it, since it was advertized to work in 6.0, but Microsoft shouldn't have to pay damages to people who never intended to use the feature to begin with.
It is hard to tell from just that article whether they were suing for damages (usually the case in class-action) or just a free upgrade, or whether the judge broke up the class because it contained people who where not injured, or because it contained people who were not at risk to be injured. This could very well be a situation where the plaintiffs lawyers would have had a good case, but they got greedy and filed overreaching complaints. Without knowing more details of the case it is impossible to say.
The best approach I have seen for technologies like this was where they opened up the market to the rich countries, but you had to pay for two - you keep one and the other gets donated to someone in a poor country.
We promote free markets by encouraging anticompetitive practices, and attacking new entepenerial buisness models.
We secure free society by taking away your rights.
We create peace and foriegn support by making unnecisiarry enemies of both the world leaders and populus.
We strive for small government by spending more than any other administration in history.
DRM is the compromise the consumer makes to have available to them a quality digital version of a work. Without DRM, there is no incentive for the artist to provide the digital version, as DRM'less digital versions can be immediately redistributed.
If there is no incentive without DRM then there should also be no incentive with it. Because DRM is a myth.
DRM only restricts people who own legally obtained copies from using them in non-approved manners. It can do nothing to prevent people with illegally obtained copies from using or distributing the work. Furthermore, it can do nothing to prevent people who have legally obtained copies from converting them to non-DRM form.
This is because unbreakable DRM is theoretically impossible. Every DRM scheme ever created has been broken shortly after it became widely used, and once a single person breaks the DRM on a work then you are back to where you started.
Therefore, the restrictions enforced by DRM are inherently limited to those who chose to obey the law to begin with, while it is no barrier those who choose to infringe on copyright.
DRM is compromise - a compromise where the consumer agrees to give up his fair-use rights, the electronic companies agree to complicate thier products, and in return none of the parties, media producer included, get anything of value in return.
Sorry, but that is not the kind of compromise that I want to make.
Funny, as soon as I loaded slashdot today, my first thought was that something looks different - they must have switched over to CSS. Sure enough scrolled down and here is the story. The font size is one difference. On my machine the headers look bigger than they used to, others have said the font looks smaller, which is to expected when you go from fixed font sizes to relative, and is a good thing. Also, in the new code the [Reply to This] and [Parent] links are now the same size as the comment text, whereas they used to be one size smaller. I think the "N Replies beneath your current threshold" also used to be smaller.
Another one that really jumps out at me is that there is more space around the text in the comment headers, than there used to be. This is true in both Firefox and IE.
I'll have to check out the CSS when I get off of work.
The traditional movie houses could do worse than to watch what pornographers do more.
What, grind out low-budget films one after an other, with low paid actors (relative to hollywood) and no plot to speak of?
Because that is what makes porn profitable. The fact that they don't clamp down so much on piracy has very little to do with it at all.
For a start it looks as if unmanned missions could achieve the same at far less cost.
Well that depends on what these missions are intended to acheive. An unmanned mission can never acheive the task of creating a sustainable human settlement in space.
From everthing I have seen that's what the moon missions are. They are not primarily exporation - we've been there, done that. They are not primarily science, our unmanned probes are doing a fine job of that. They are looking somewhat at how to use the resources on the moon, but I strongly doubt that it will ever be economical to harvest them for use on earth - use on the moon by settlers is another story. In all the announcements, they have made a point to state that this time we are going back to stay - after a few preliminary missions, we will be leaving astronauts up there for months, turning into years on end.
I was originally very sceptical of Bush's back to the moon vision, but NASA has turned it into something good. We will soon have an inexpensive set of crafts capable of replacing (heck exceding) the shuttle, and we have a marked shift in the goal of the manned space program from science (better done by unmanned) to settlement. Which, IMHO, is the entire reason that humans should be in space at all. All with only a minor increase in the budget. I am very excited by all this.
I agree with Daniel's post, there is some computer research that does develop significant new advances. The reason that the vast majority of software patents are garbage is not because software research yields less good results than biotech research but because the patent office allows people to patent what they are doing, not how they are doing it (and also because there is no practical, objective way to determine the non-obviousness of an invention).
But even in the cases where computer research does result in legitimate advancement in the field, I am not at all convinced that granting a monopoly helps the "advancement of arts and science" when it comes to the computer industry. Video codecs are an excellent example of work that does require a good deal of research, and thus fit the traditional criteria of being useful, novel, and non-obvious.
However, what been the effect of codec patents on the industry? It has devolved the standardization process into a political battle where all parties involved are just trying to get their patented technology included, so that they can get their part of the royalty pie. It has significantly increased the cost of video encoding, and the lack of a truly open standard has complicated the task of getting video to people in a format they can play. Worse, the patents are increasingly being used not to protect their invention, but to force certain behavior on the rest of the industry, by refusing to license patents on "standard" formats to groups that do not comply (for example if they don't implement DRM).
As for the benefits of patents, I have a very hard time believing that someone somewhere would not have developed quality codecs in the absence of patents. Many of the encoding techniques developed were started by researchers in Universities who then moved onto industry where they refined their ideas. The effect of industry may have initially been to accelerated codec development through funding research. However, in the long term it appears to have also hindered it by locking the results up in patents, thus limiting the ability of researchers to collaborate and improve upon existing designs.
So all in all, the evidence that codec patents helped the industry is fairly weak, while it has definitely hindered the industry.
As for the merit of biotech patents, well the entire economic model of the medical field in this country is a mess. I am only beginning to wrap my head around what the sources of the problems are, and am in no position to give suggestions as to how to improve it.
Bah, my pets were never that well-behaved. Bringing the frisbee back to you after you threw it - what is the fun in that? No, with my dogs you had to chase them down and pry it out of their mouths, while defending from the other dogs that were also trying to get at it. It made for some awesome games of base^H^H^H^Hcalvin ball.
Which brings me to the question of why these role playing games never include any decent side games. From everything I have talked to this game has the pet-owner emotional attachment parts down to a tee, but then you have all the boring things, that you would have in real life. I guess it has the redeeming factor of teaching kids responsibility, but as an adult I have enough of that, so it just comes acrossed as meaningless busy work - the infamous grind. Why not make the contests where you earn money more fun mini-games?
If you look at the old Atari games, most of them were nothing but mini games, and they fun. Now you have all these MMORPGs, where advancement and community is the entertaining aspect of the game, while the things you do to advance are dull, dull, dull. Something that Nintendo does very well in nearly all their games is combining fun gameplay with the opportunity for advancement (new things to unlock). I am still waiting for someone to create a MMORPG, take a cue from the old Atari games and newer games like Super Monkeyball, Mario Party, and approach the advancement tasks like they were mini-games that are fun to play in and of themselves. They would have to do a little more work to integrate them into the game (for immersion and all that), preferably happening in the same world. For example, being in a race should be implemented more like vehicles in FPS, rather than like Mario party where map screen and game screens are completely different. They would also have to include multiplayer coop games for the community aspects, and have different characters classes and stats would result in diffent advantages in the games. If anyone ever did this, it would be pure crack.
First off, you are not forced to get a new monitor unless you want to play HDCP content at full resolution. Most home users won't upgrade the OS until they get a new computer, and thus won't care. Most corporate customers don't care about HDCP.
Furthermore, if you do want to play HDCP content legally you either need an HDCP compliant monitor or HDCP compliant software which will degrade the video. Yes this applies to Windows, but it also applies to Linux, Mac OS X, and any other OS or stand-alone device that plays HDCP content.
While individual users (and some non-USians) can go ahead an use an illegal implementation, this is not an option for the corporate and educational markets that Novell targets. So linux has no advantage over Windows whatsoever in this regard.
That's all well and good, but people, we are already DECADES behind on this problem. Whether you like it or not, there's a boatload of Word95/Excel/BMP/etc files out there (and worse).
:) Sorry if I came across as trivializing your work, I definitely didn't mean to do so. Good luck, and hopefully the job will get easier in the future and not worse.
Tell me about it. It would take more fingers than I have just to count all the proprietary formats we have for engineering drawings around here
I have been saying for years that the DoD should make an initiative to move towards open standards for this exact reason. The document retention requirements they have are incredible, and yet nearly all the documents generated are saved in proprietary formats. Now with the OASIS (OpenDoc) format solidifying and there is more than one implementation of it, they wouldn't even have to define a standard for word processing or spreadsheets.
Obviously, open standards are not a panacea. There are countless standards created by the military that never really spread farther than that, and therefore the support for them is limited (and thus companies that do support it can charge a pretty penny for it). And with open standards, at it is much easier to write an implementation if you need to. Compare this to MS Word, which is a pain to reverse engineer now, just imagine having to do so in the distant future, when it is not as widespread. And of course, for the very long term, nothing is more certain (and more inconvenient) than printing everything out and storing it in a warehouse, which is what is done now. But the longer that can be postponed, the more money can be saved.
As an added bonus, just imagine the competition that would spring up in the word processor market, if the DoD mandated that all new word processor documents generated internally or by contractors be in OASIS format, starting 5-10 years from now. Microsoft would have to support it (and well) or throw away a huge number of Office sales. The DoD would no longer be locked into a single vendor, saving them money upfront in addition to the money they saved on document retention.
Until then, the best plan is likely to convert as much as possible to a few standards like PDF, which is what I expect will happen here.