"Unethical, yes, but then lots of unethical things pass for normal and legal business these days."
I'd even question wether it's unethical. Embarrasing, yes, and telling, sure.
But unethical? If essays and theses are so easily manufactured, replicated and/or forged, perhaps it's time to reconsider the methods by which such academic achievements are evaluated.
Perhaps we should exercise some cross-discipline teamwork and have engineering and research students team up with technical writers and humanist (english, journalism, etc) students instead? Having such a team produce an original, legible and yet correct and scientifically sound paper would perhaps be a far more appropriate and useful exercise than either of the pair separately trying to do something they might suck at (and, hey, maybe we'd get journalists that dont always get the science wrong and scientific articles that dont make your eyes bleed out of it too).
"how many jobs _are_ we nuking in the process? and can the rest of the economy absorb those?"
Mmm, an annoying, incorrect and yet, sadly, far too common argument.
As, presumably, those jobs are currently paid jobs, nuking those jobs will leave those resources available in the rest of the economy instead, so of course it can absorb them. The money paying them came from somewhere, that somewhere will still have the money and will spend it elsewhere, creating new jobs instead.
Busywork, in its most useless sense, means you are diverting resources from the economy to produce something inherenly undesired. Unfortunately, that means that the wealth those resources would have otherwise produced doesnt get produced, so the economy as a whole generates a suboptimal level of wealth.
"At any rate, that's why a lot of unproductive and even mildly unethical stuff is allowed to exist."
Actually, I'd say that the main reason is the blanket refusal to acknowledge that that whole problem is a change and distribution of wealth problem. As long as you encourage waste you dont have to call it 'wealth redistribution'. Creating (and allowing) busywork is essentially (from a wealth creation pov) no different from taxing the needed workers and putting the non-workers on welfare. It's just not as noticable and easily measured.
Of course, a much better an productive way to solve the whole problem would be to simply cut working time (which was essentially what was done in the agrarian->industrial economic revolution). Cut working time as productivity increases and production need decreases, and you solve a whole host of other issues like stress related illnesses and retirement problems.
Personally I'd far rather work four hours per day 'til I'm 80 and have everything cost half as much, rather than work 8 hours and pay twice the tax and prices to keep a whole host of people doing nothing in the economy.
"GPL has some pretty harsh restrictions on what the users of the code can do."
No. The GPL has no restrictions on what users of the code can do. The GPL isnt an EULA. The GPL is a copyright license, and as such only becomes relevant once you want to do something you would otherwise be forbidden to do by copyright law, ie, copy, modify and distribute.
"care about the people who only intend to use the compiled software."
Care about the people as in ensuring that they too have access to the code, should the software not perform the task they wish? Care about the people as in care about their right to share the software with friends if they enjoy it?
Caring about people takes many forms; sometimes it means denying others the ability to gain power and control over them.
"Of course, there may be a rather uncomfortable adjustment period"
As free software tends to replace instances where duplication of effort is the norm rather than the exception, I'd say the adjustment period would be going from doing the same thing over and over and over again to writing actual new things.
Instead of writing a new menu button on the word processor and changing the file format to be incompatible, getting paid, rinse, repeat ad nauseum, we might actually be writing better systems to accomplish other things.
Somehow I think programmers in general could live with that. And, really, I have yet to experience any situation where the real need for programmers was less than the availability.
I'm not confusing them, it's intentional. For the purpose of this particular discussion, all the various forms have sliding scales of application, and are, in their monopolistic essense, the same, it's just a question of degree of similarity.
"You can copyright a specific instance of a song, a movie, an essay, etc."
And when someone else does the same song with different instruments. Or when some other author writes books about wizards in school. Etc. The application of copyright law these days is far wider than just specific instances.
A chair cannot be copyrighted as 'a chair', but various designs could be protected with design rights (or, actually, if you claim enough creative input, you might even try to run a copyright case on your chair color and design pattern), and specific constructions could definitely be patented. With enough design patterns permanently protected, you'd end up just there; you couldnt actually build a chair without being exposed to IP violation threats.
The essense remains the same; it's not about protecting property, it's about infringing everyone elses freedoms and denying them right to make a chair, a piece of music, a novel, wether all on their own or just like the one they bought. With permanent protection it would be impossible to ever make anything.
"So much insanity in that article I don't know where to start"
The insanity starts where it usually does; the Mr. Helprin confuses a monopoly with property (which, of course, is the entire point of calling it intellectual 'property').
What if the maker of the chair had the perpetual monopoly right? Nobody else would be allowed to make chairs. What if the maker of the house had a perpetual monopoly on building houses? Well, Mr Helprin wouldn't have a problem with the government taking his house when he died; he wouldn't have a house.
Property is the right to own what you make or buy. Monopoly rights is the right to prevent anyone else from making the same (or sufficiently similar) thing. Wether the copy is made by hand, or by machines makes no difference to the essence.
"you don't see criminals purporting to represent U.S. government agencies by using fake.gov domains"
Nah, they use real.gov domains instead.
Seriously tho, when it comes to banks they're even harder than governments to tell apart the good guys from the bad guys. Banking regulations are not at all the same over the world, and I suspect it might not be that hard for serious phishers to get a 'real' bank registered in some less regulated country. And would.bank deny registration to Offshore Islands Phishermens Bank? Just now I got a google ad advertising 140 Russian banks for sale...
The very idea that security vendors would automatically trust anything just because it had special domain or a special designation has me wondering how seriously they've tried to break their own idea.
Further, F-Secure validating all sites under a domain doesnt need a new TLD, they could just as well register.bank.us and verify everyone under that (and, hey, just validate US banks under it, just so we have a less wide definition of the word 'bank').
Of course, the trouble with both certificates and validated domains is essentially that you get more profit the less you validate and the more customers you accept. Which means it's not in the providers actual financial interest to do what they say they do. Which is why we have Verisign and co suggesting brand-spanking-new extraspecial validated certificates. Which they have all the incentive to turn into crap and then come up with yet another, extraextraspecial validated... etc.
With ten years experience working with enterprise class mission critical systems, I've seen those arguments (and those systems) many times. And yet in my experience, the 'rated uptimes' seem to be some definition of 'when the system is up and working the uptime will be 6 9's', because between everything from bugs through randomly incompatible hardware through firmware upgrades through operator (yes, the vendors own certified technicians) error, the actual on-line time for that kind of system usually isnt even close to the standalone COTS systems we have.
That rather jives with the recent article here on slashdot on MTBF of consumer grade v.s enterprise grade disks. Turns out the consumer disks MTBF was actually accurate, and the enterprise grade MTBF was in reality the same as the consumer grade, despite being stated as being twice as much.
And dont even get me started on disk subsystem based remote copy software. If you really need it because there is no other way to create offsite redundancy then so many system design errors have been made that the software is more or less impossible to secure and should be scrapped and redesigned from scratch. Which I'd venture is why they charge so much for it.
"When the cost of not having a backup restored for 1 hour can be in 7 figures, never mind if its down for a day, then 18k for a drive is pocket change."
When all the 18k buys you is a lot of salesman 'enterprise grade' bullshit, barely tested hardware ('expensive' has a fair overlap with 'exclusive', which surprisingly often means you're going to be the one to run into the bugs) and no guarantees that will even get you an apology when the system fails, you're better off spending those 18K on 18 times the redundancy which would give you a vastly higher real availability for the same money.
If it's data I actually care about I'll go for many eyeballs, low price and high redundancy every time these days. Promises from vendors dont get your data back when they screw up.
It is if you have two inexpensive devices that you umount and power down. Or five. Or a second computer with the devices. The philosophy inherent in the concept Redundant Array of Inexpensive Devices, as opposed to the various forms of RAID, is to use lots of cheap hardware to replace expensive overengineered really (really, really, we promise!) reliable hardware.
Sure you can wipe one device with a misplaced rm. You can wipe a tape with a misplaced rewind (heck, I've seen tape devices on shared busses get rewound by misbehaving applications in the middle of another machines backups). Or conceivable a holographic storage module with a misplaced laser pointer (or in a variety of other more likely ways).
Redundancy is the key to data safety. And for redundancy, inexpensive and simple is the way to go.
Magnetic media fails if it's constantly used. Turn a TB disk off and store it on the shelf, and I doubt it will fail any faster than your average optical storage.
Either way, if you want to be sure about your archived data, forget 'backup' and 'archive' paradigms and keep multiple copies online on live storage where you'll actually note, and can recover from, backing media failures. Live storage is as cheap as media based backups and archives for most dataset sizes and purposes these days, and will only get more so as the driving storage consumers tilts even more into the realm of home use.
Of course, you can build a multiterabyte disk-to-disk backup system with gigabit transferrates out of common of the shelf hardware for less than $1000.
The cost of having backups can certainly be made a lot less than $18000.
"unless they expect thos things to have liftimes in the thousands of years range."
Of course, as the drives are likely to be around for about five years and you'll be able to find a servicable used part for a decade after that, a thousand year life time might not serve much purpose.
The trouble with that kind of 'archival media' is that once you realize you need the archive you have nothing with which to read it anyway.
You're better off carrying the data live on some form of redundant array of inexpensive devices, migrating it as storage expands and changes. And if you really need a protection against tampering store a checksum or signature on a redundant array of common inexpensive write-once devices. Like CD-R's. Or a paper printout at a public notary.
I havent ever spent as much money on music in my entire life as I have on eMusic. $10 per month is a lot considering that I used to buy maybe 2 or 3 CD's per year. Of course, with 40 tracks I have to download every month (or the remaining ones get scrapped at next refill) I'm getting quite a lot more music than I used to. And I listen to far, far, more artists.
Of course, the mainstream music industry isnt interested in people listening to more and more varied music; their revenue stream would get horribly diluted if they had to pay out more than a few percent to the actual artists and composers. They'd rather market a few artists reaping the majority of the consumer spending available, and with less revenue per track they'd get less money to spend on marketing in turn leading to a failure for them to marginalize non-signed or non-mainstream artists.
Which just goes to show; the economic game created by monopoly rights isnt conductive to promoting the creative arts. It's simply good at promoting market control.
"I think human activity has an effect on the climate"
There are also indications it may be a question of balance. I've read suggestions that the reason we didnt notice CO2 effects earlier in the century may be that we were actually countering the effect with particle release. The environmentally sound policy of filtering particulates and decreasing pollution may be what's suddenly causing the hockey-stick effect as the cooling effect of particle pollution disappears (which can be correlated with theories around cold triggered by forest fires, meteor extinction and volcano eruptions).
In such a case it might be a far more cost-effective (not to mention the vastly increased likelyhood of actual success) to develop non-damaging or positive releases of particulate matter (how about highly aerosolized lime spray, countering environmental acid rain at the same time?)
Dont get me wrong, personally I think it's utter idiocy to burn fossile fuels, for a whole host of reasons ranging from the cost in blood and corruption to the economic and social impact of being dependent on a fundamentally limited resource available only in a few places, when we're surrounded by a vast host of much better alternatives, and I'm very much in support of highly taxing the hell out of that use; to the point that I'd call european gasoline taxes too low, and the funds should be used to support renewable fuel and renewable fuel research (non-patentable such research).
But the in the end, if global warming truly is such a problem that the alarmists suggest, then we need actual methods to counter it, not simply sitting on our arses and waiting for the propaganda battle to play out, which it simply isnt going to do until the oil runs out or there's something better to use (or the US citizens realize that two party systems are easily bought, are nowhere near democratic, and demand proportional representation at the barrel of a gun if need be.).
Sort of. If you take a look at theory for enforcing EULA's on software in some places the argument is that as the device makes a copy from disk into memory, copyright applies. In Denmark, I believe it was, there was a legal argument that routers making copies of packets during transmission were subject to copyright regulations (heh, that gives me a nice idea, has anyone tried to sueing the government for copyright violation on their illicit wiretaps and stuff? Sure you can read my email, I just want to get _paid_ when you do...).
The failure of the legal system to cope with ambigous situations and changing technology isnt exactly new, but unforunately it gives rise to certain grey areas which werent the original intent of the legislation.
Even more interesting is, why is there no tax on _recorded_ media, going to the artists and creators?
Let anyone produce and distribute the media, and do away with the whole IP industry debacle by simply putting a levy on revenue made off the final product and paying the creators out of that. If there really is a need to subsidize creativity beyond what the free market does anyway. Which the last decades explosion of free creative work indicates there might not be.
I compared all over the place, but really. I often prefer to read Slashdot and Slashdot comments (and, in fact, a whole lot of other activities) to watching what's on TV. So on the average, the percieved value of slashdot comments may actually be higher than the value of the professionally produced crap that's on TV.
The cost may be higher to produce the TV show, but that just shows what a complete waste of resources it is to 'protect' such material, when the eventual percieved value of the material is lower than other production with a zero capital input.
"can any harm happen with an excess of red blood cells?"
NAD either, but if you consider common blood failure modes that would probably be in the realms of blood clots (plastic clots?), ie, too thick blood causing blockage, or blood not clotting (plastic blood doesnt result in breakage of blood cells at point of injury, and thus messes with triggers for clotting) and you get bleeding (which may or may not be a problem if you have an unlimited supply of plastic blood).
I can certainly see the use, but the long term effects may be of some concern.
True, and there will be other attack forms (like scanning traffic, listening for dhcp solicitations, listening for other broadcasts or simply setting up honeypots to collect ip addresses like spammers collect mail addresses).
Actual network probes will remain prohibitive tho; it's not a problem of cpu capacity, it's a problem of actual time (you have to wait for responses) and traffic amounts. Apart from broadcast attacks, you simply cant do it faster or less noticable no matter how fast your hardware gets. It works when half the adresses are occupied, but when one in a million is, there are simply much better ways to get more adresses.
Yet us slashdot bums sit here writing comments without expectation of monetary rewards. And a whole lot do it with our bum-provided browsers and longhaired crazy beard written OS.
Apparently your theory is a bit off. Qualify it with 'some people will not write some creative works without getting paid for it'.
Somehow, judging by the quality of mainstream entertainment and commercial software, I'd rather think we'd do fairly well without them.
"when addresses are doled out, they're doled out in evenly-spaced, predictable sequence"
v6 adresses, as a general rule, arent doled out. You get a routed/64 subnet, then you autoconfigure/assign each device on your 64bit subnet. Scanning a 64bit address space means you're scanning about err... 18 quintillion addresses (eh, bigger number than I know my prefixes)? Sure, it's a bit more predictable with internal subnetting and certain predictable parts of mac adresses (which could trivially be depredictableized), but it's a prohibitively more difficult problem, particularly if you're assuming response times and trying to avoid getting noticed, which you probably would be if you were flooding an internet connection with several trillion connection attempts per hour.
"What'sdriving it now that wasn't driving it five years ago?"
Virtualization. Where you once had one machine serving several applications, it's now become trivial to separate applications into differing vm's for security, simplicity and scalability. You'll still want to adress the unique vm's, and ipv6 is a great way to do it.
Fast forward ten years and you'll have applications the way you have VM's today. Instead of deploying an app on a specific platform, you'll be able to deploy a VM image like you fork a process today. If you thought you needed IP's today, wait 'til your processes not only require their own PID but also their own IP address.
Dump the mafiaa and simply implement a flat tax on revenue derived by reproducing/transmission of (any) copyrighted work. Divide money to creators according to amount of copying and (significant) contribution levels. Put a ceiling at a more than reasonable means of living.
Tada, suddenly there's no need for the mafiaa corps, nor any lawyers for creators to get paid. And everyone could copy to their hearts desire, and simply pay a tax if they feel like doing some ad-financed broadcasting or selling physical copies.
"Each to his own, but I don't think I'd want to do that on my own systems"
I very much agree. Cramming everything into the filesystem means you lose a lot of flexibility, you lose the ease of layering new developments into the stack, and you get one huge maintenance problem on your hands. ZFS looks good on a feature checklist, but I'm not sure I'd want to store valuable data on it.
Apparently, you haven't even looked at any performance comparisons. Linux easily keeps up with, and sometimes even exceeds, performance, even under API replication solutions such as Cedega or Wine.
Slashdot Mirror
"Unethical, yes, but then lots of unethical things pass for normal and legal business these days."
I'd even question wether it's unethical. Embarrasing, yes, and telling, sure.
But unethical? If essays and theses are so easily manufactured, replicated and/or forged, perhaps it's time to reconsider the methods by which such academic achievements are evaluated.
Perhaps we should exercise some cross-discipline teamwork and have engineering and research students team up with technical writers and humanist (english, journalism, etc) students instead? Having such a team produce an original, legible and yet correct and scientifically sound paper would perhaps be a far more appropriate and useful exercise than either of the pair separately trying to do something they might suck at (and, hey, maybe we'd get journalists that dont always get the science wrong and scientific articles that dont make your eyes bleed out of it too).
"how many jobs _are_ we nuking in the process? and can the rest of the economy absorb those?"
Mmm, an annoying, incorrect and yet, sadly, far too common argument.
As, presumably, those jobs are currently paid jobs, nuking those jobs will leave those resources available in the rest of the economy instead, so of course it can absorb them. The money paying them came from somewhere, that somewhere will still have the money and will spend it elsewhere, creating new jobs instead.
Busywork, in its most useless sense, means you are diverting resources from the economy to produce something inherenly undesired. Unfortunately, that means that the wealth those resources would have otherwise produced doesnt get produced, so the economy as a whole generates a suboptimal level of wealth.
"At any rate, that's why a lot of unproductive and even mildly unethical stuff is allowed to exist."
Actually, I'd say that the main reason is the blanket refusal to acknowledge that that whole problem is a change and distribution of wealth problem. As long as you encourage waste you dont have to call it 'wealth redistribution'. Creating (and allowing) busywork is essentially (from a wealth creation pov) no different from taxing the needed workers and putting the non-workers on welfare. It's just not as noticable and easily measured.
Of course, a much better an productive way to solve the whole problem would be to simply cut working time (which was essentially what was done in the agrarian->industrial economic revolution). Cut working time as productivity increases and production need decreases, and you solve a whole host of other issues like stress related illnesses and retirement problems.
Personally I'd far rather work four hours per day 'til I'm 80 and have everything cost half as much, rather than work 8 hours and pay twice the tax and prices to keep a whole host of people doing nothing in the economy.
"GPL has some pretty harsh restrictions on what the users of the code can do."
No. The GPL has no restrictions on what users of the code can do. The GPL isnt an EULA. The GPL is a copyright license, and as such only becomes relevant once you want to do something you would otherwise be forbidden to do by copyright law, ie, copy, modify and distribute.
"care about the people who only intend to use the compiled software."
Care about the people as in ensuring that they too have access to the code, should the software not perform the task they wish? Care about the people as in care about their right to share the software with friends if they enjoy it?
Caring about people takes many forms; sometimes it means denying others the ability to gain power and control over them.
"Of course, there may be a rather uncomfortable adjustment period"
As free software tends to replace instances where duplication of effort is the norm rather than the exception, I'd say the adjustment period would be going from doing the same thing over and over and over again to writing actual new things.
Instead of writing a new menu button on the word processor and changing the file format to be incompatible, getting paid, rinse, repeat ad nauseum, we might actually be writing better systems to accomplish other things.
Somehow I think programmers in general could live with that. And, really, I have yet to experience any situation where the real need for programmers was less than the availability.
"but you're confusing copyright with other forms"
I'm not confusing them, it's intentional. For the purpose of this particular discussion, all the various forms have sliding scales of application, and are, in their monopolistic essense, the same, it's just a question of degree of similarity.
"You can copyright a specific instance of a song, a movie, an essay, etc."
And when someone else does the same song with different instruments. Or when some other author writes books about wizards in school. Etc. The application of copyright law these days is far wider than just specific instances.
A chair cannot be copyrighted as 'a chair', but various designs could be protected with design rights (or, actually, if you claim enough creative input, you might even try to run a copyright case on your chair color and design pattern), and specific constructions could definitely be patented. With enough design patterns permanently protected, you'd end up just there; you couldnt actually build a chair without being exposed to IP violation threats.
The essense remains the same; it's not about protecting property, it's about infringing everyone elses freedoms and denying them right to make a chair, a piece of music, a novel, wether all on their own or just like the one they bought. With permanent protection it would be impossible to ever make anything.
See, there you do it again. Property is the ownership of a thing, monopoly is the right to prevent anyone else from creating the thing.
"So much insanity in that article I don't know where to start"
The insanity starts where it usually does; the Mr. Helprin confuses a monopoly with property (which, of course, is the entire point of calling it intellectual 'property').
What if the maker of the chair had the perpetual monopoly right? Nobody else would be allowed to make chairs. What if the maker of the house had a perpetual monopoly on building houses? Well, Mr Helprin wouldn't have a problem with the government taking his house when he died; he wouldn't have a house.
Property is the right to own what you make or buy. Monopoly rights is the right to prevent anyone else from making the same (or sufficiently similar) thing. Wether the copy is made by hand, or by machines makes no difference to the essence.
"you don't see criminals purporting to represent U.S. government agencies by using fake .gov domains"
.gov domains instead.
.bank deny registration to Offshore Islands Phishermens Bank? Just now I got a google ad advertising 140 Russian banks for sale...
.bank.us and verify everyone under that (and, hey, just validate US banks under it, just so we have a less wide definition of the word 'bank').
Nah, they use real
Seriously tho, when it comes to banks they're even harder than governments to tell apart the good guys from the bad guys. Banking regulations are not at all the same over the world, and I suspect it might not be that hard for serious phishers to get a 'real' bank registered in some less regulated country. And would
The very idea that security vendors would automatically trust anything just because it had special domain or a special designation has me wondering how seriously they've tried to break their own idea.
Further, F-Secure validating all sites under a domain doesnt need a new TLD, they could just as well register
Of course, the trouble with both certificates and validated domains is essentially that you get more profit the less you validate and the more customers you accept. Which means it's not in the providers actual financial interest to do what they say they do. Which is why we have Verisign and co suggesting brand-spanking-new extraspecial validated certificates. Which they have all the incentive to turn into crap and then come up with yet another, extraextraspecial validated... etc.
With ten years experience working with enterprise class mission critical systems, I've seen those arguments (and those systems) many times. And yet in my experience, the 'rated uptimes' seem to be some definition of 'when the system is up and working the uptime will be 6 9's', because between everything from bugs through randomly incompatible hardware through firmware upgrades through operator (yes, the vendors own certified technicians) error, the actual on-line time for that kind of system usually isnt even close to the standalone COTS systems we have.
That rather jives with the recent article here on slashdot on MTBF of consumer grade v.s enterprise grade disks. Turns out the consumer disks MTBF was actually accurate, and the enterprise grade MTBF was in reality the same as the consumer grade, despite being stated as being twice as much.
And dont even get me started on disk subsystem based remote copy software. If you really need it because there is no other way to create offsite redundancy then so many system design errors have been made that the software is more or less impossible to secure and should be scrapped and redesigned from scratch. Which I'd venture is why they charge so much for it.
"When the cost of not having a backup restored for 1 hour can be in 7 figures, never mind if its down for a day, then 18k for a drive is pocket change."
When all the 18k buys you is a lot of salesman 'enterprise grade' bullshit, barely tested hardware ('expensive' has a fair overlap with 'exclusive', which surprisingly often means you're going to be the one to run into the bugs) and no guarantees that will even get you an apology when the system fails, you're better off spending those 18K on 18 times the redundancy which would give you a vastly higher real availability for the same money.
If it's data I actually care about I'll go for many eyeballs, low price and high redundancy every time these days. Promises from vendors dont get your data back when they screw up.
"But RAID is not a backup solution."
It is if you have two inexpensive devices that you umount and power down. Or five. Or a second computer with the devices. The philosophy inherent in the concept Redundant Array of Inexpensive Devices, as opposed to the various forms of RAID, is to use lots of cheap hardware to replace expensive overengineered really (really, really, we promise!) reliable hardware.
Sure you can wipe one device with a misplaced rm. You can wipe a tape with a misplaced rewind (heck, I've seen tape devices on shared busses get rewound by misbehaving applications in the middle of another machines backups). Or conceivable a holographic storage module with a misplaced laser pointer (or in a variety of other more likely ways).
Redundancy is the key to data safety. And for redundancy, inexpensive and simple is the way to go.
Magnetic media fails if it's constantly used. Turn a TB disk off and store it on the shelf, and I doubt it will fail any faster than your average optical storage.
Either way, if you want to be sure about your archived data, forget 'backup' and 'archive' paradigms and keep multiple copies online on live storage where you'll actually note, and can recover from, backing media failures. Live storage is as cheap as media based backups and archives for most dataset sizes and purposes these days, and will only get more so as the driving storage consumers tilts even more into the realm of home use.
"speed trumps price just about every time."
Of course, you can build a multiterabyte disk-to-disk backup system with gigabit transferrates out of common of the shelf hardware for less than $1000.
The cost of having backups can certainly be made a lot less than $18000.
"unless they expect thos things to have liftimes in the thousands of years range."
Of course, as the drives are likely to be around for about five years and you'll be able to find a servicable used part for a decade after that, a thousand year life time might not serve much purpose.
The trouble with that kind of 'archival media' is that once you realize you need the archive you have nothing with which to read it anyway.
You're better off carrying the data live on some form of redundant array of inexpensive devices, migrating it as storage expands and changes. And if you really need a protection against tampering store a checksum or signature on a redundant array of common inexpensive write-once devices. Like CD-R's. Or a paper printout at a public notary.
I havent ever spent as much money on music in my entire life as I have on eMusic. $10 per month is a lot considering that I used to buy maybe 2 or 3 CD's per year. Of course, with 40 tracks I have to download every month (or the remaining ones get scrapped at next refill) I'm getting quite a lot more music than I used to. And I listen to far, far, more artists.
Of course, the mainstream music industry isnt interested in people listening to more and more varied music; their revenue stream would get horribly diluted if they had to pay out more than a few percent to the actual artists and composers. They'd rather market a few artists reaping the majority of the consumer spending available, and with less revenue per track they'd get less money to spend on marketing in turn leading to a failure for them to marginalize non-signed or non-mainstream artists.
Which just goes to show; the economic game created by monopoly rights isnt conductive to promoting the creative arts. It's simply good at promoting market control.
"I think human activity has an effect on the climate"
There are also indications it may be a question of balance. I've read suggestions that the reason we didnt notice CO2 effects earlier in the century may be that we were actually countering the effect with particle release. The environmentally sound policy of filtering particulates and decreasing pollution may be what's suddenly causing the hockey-stick effect as the cooling effect of particle pollution disappears (which can be correlated with theories around cold triggered by forest fires, meteor extinction and volcano eruptions).
In such a case it might be a far more cost-effective (not to mention the vastly increased likelyhood of actual success) to develop non-damaging or positive releases of particulate matter (how about highly aerosolized lime spray, countering environmental acid rain at the same time?)
Dont get me wrong, personally I think it's utter idiocy to burn fossile fuels, for a whole host of reasons ranging from the cost in blood and corruption to the economic and social impact of being dependent on a fundamentally limited resource available only in a few places, when we're surrounded by a vast host of much better alternatives, and I'm very much in support of highly taxing the hell out of that use; to the point that I'd call european gasoline taxes too low, and the funds should be used to support renewable fuel and renewable fuel research (non-patentable such research).
But the in the end, if global warming truly is such a problem that the alarmists suggest, then we need actual methods to counter it, not simply sitting on our arses and waiting for the propaganda battle to play out, which it simply isnt going to do until the oil runs out or there's something better to use (or the US citizens realize that two party systems are easily bought, are nowhere near democratic, and demand proportional representation at the barrel of a gun if need be.).
Sort of. If you take a look at theory for enforcing EULA's on software in some places the argument is that as the device makes a copy from disk into memory, copyright applies. In Denmark, I believe it was, there was a legal argument that routers making copies of packets during transmission were subject to copyright regulations (heh, that gives me a nice idea, has anyone tried to sueing the government for copyright violation on their illicit wiretaps and stuff? Sure you can read my email, I just want to get _paid_ when you do...).
The failure of the legal system to cope with ambigous situations and changing technology isnt exactly new, but unforunately it gives rise to certain grey areas which werent the original intent of the legislation.
"And if not, why not?"
Even more interesting is, why is there no tax on _recorded_ media, going to the artists and creators?
Let anyone produce and distribute the media, and do away with the whole IP industry debacle by simply putting a levy on revenue made off the final product and paying the creators out of that. If there really is a need to subsidize creativity beyond what the free market does anyway. Which the last decades explosion of free creative work indicates there might not be.
I compared all over the place, but really. I often prefer to read Slashdot and Slashdot comments (and, in fact, a whole lot of other activities) to watching what's on TV. So on the average, the percieved value of slashdot comments may actually be higher than the value of the professionally produced crap that's on TV.
The cost may be higher to produce the TV show, but that just shows what a complete waste of resources it is to 'protect' such material, when the eventual percieved value of the material is lower than other production with a zero capital input.
"can any harm happen with an excess of red blood cells?"
NAD either, but if you consider common blood failure modes that would probably be in the realms of blood clots (plastic clots?), ie, too thick blood causing blockage, or blood not clotting (plastic blood doesnt result in breakage of blood cells at point of injury, and thus messes with triggers for clotting) and you get bleeding (which may or may not be a problem if you have an unlimited supply of plastic blood).
I can certainly see the use, but the long term effects may be of some concern.
True, and there will be other attack forms (like scanning traffic, listening for dhcp solicitations, listening for other broadcasts or simply setting up honeypots to collect ip addresses like spammers collect mail addresses).
Actual network probes will remain prohibitive tho; it's not a problem of cpu capacity, it's a problem of actual time (you have to wait for responses) and traffic amounts. Apart from broadcast attacks, you simply cant do it faster or less noticable no matter how fast your hardware gets. It works when half the adresses are occupied, but when one in a million is, there are simply much better ways to get more adresses.
Yet us slashdot bums sit here writing comments without expectation of monetary rewards. And a whole lot do it with our bum-provided browsers and longhaired crazy beard written OS.
Apparently your theory is a bit off. Qualify it with 'some people will not write some creative works without getting paid for it'.
Somehow, judging by the quality of mainstream entertainment and commercial software, I'd rather think we'd do fairly well without them.
"when addresses are doled out, they're doled out in evenly-spaced, predictable sequence"
/64 subnet, then you autoconfigure/assign each device on your 64bit subnet. Scanning a 64bit address space means you're scanning about err... 18 quintillion addresses (eh, bigger number than I know my prefixes)? Sure, it's a bit more predictable with internal subnetting and certain predictable parts of mac adresses (which could trivially be depredictableized), but it's a prohibitively more difficult problem, particularly if you're assuming response times and trying to avoid getting noticed, which you probably would be if you were flooding an internet connection with several trillion connection attempts per hour.
v6 adresses, as a general rule, arent doled out. You get a routed
"What'sdriving it now that wasn't driving it five years ago?"
Virtualization. Where you once had one machine serving several applications, it's now become trivial to separate applications into differing vm's for security, simplicity and scalability. You'll still want to adress the unique vm's, and ipv6 is a great way to do it.
Fast forward ten years and you'll have applications the way you have VM's today. Instead of deploying an app on a specific platform, you'll be able to deploy a VM image like you fork a process today. If you thought you needed IP's today, wait 'til your processes not only require their own PID but also their own IP address.
Dump the mafiaa and simply implement a flat tax on revenue derived by reproducing/transmission of (any) copyrighted work. Divide money to creators according to amount of copying and (significant) contribution levels. Put a ceiling at a more than reasonable means of living.
Tada, suddenly there's no need for the mafiaa corps, nor any lawyers for creators to get paid. And everyone could copy to their hearts desire, and simply pay a tax if they feel like doing some ad-financed broadcasting or selling physical copies.
"Each to his own, but I don't think I'd want to do that on my own systems"
I very much agree. Cramming everything into the filesystem means you lose a lot of flexibility, you lose the ease of layering new developments into the stack, and you get one huge maintenance problem on your hands. ZFS looks good on a feature checklist, but I'm not sure I'd want to store valuable data on it.
Apparently, you haven't even looked at any performance comparisons. Linux easily keeps up with, and sometimes even exceeds, performance, even under API replication solutions such as Cedega or Wine.
Google for linux windows games performance.