It's true, isn't it? Your average terrorist is probably out there pirating software, cheating on their spouses, and experimenting with illegal narcotics.
Of course, terrorists also eat, go to the bathroom, and occasionally bathe too. That's because it's what people do. Correlation does not equal causality, unless you're very well paid to believe so.
Not that I disagree with the sentiment, but aren't patents basically to encourage and reward research? Therefore, isn't what is being protected, at core, the usage of knowledge?
It seems the question at hand is where a line should be drawn, not that there shouldn't be a line at all.
It is propaganda that moment anyone uses the term "Intellectual Property." The law recognizes no such thing. The law recognizes limitations on rights to duplicate *real* property, of attempting to pass as someone else, and a limited span of prevention of use of certain registered inventions. But nothing "intellectual" is ever owned.
>>Weeks? Are they throttling your connection down to dial-up speeds for that backup?
More or less, yes. I haven't determined exactly what things are throttled down to. I'd suspect an exponentially decreasing curve which flatlines somewhere around 39.9 GB, but as it was crawling at the beginning too I can't really say.
I'm a customer of one of the other "unlimited disk space" (for remote backup) companies. It is pretty clear that unlimited disk space does not equal unlimited bandwidth. Even on a very fat upstream, it has taken weeks to backup 40 GB.
Available now. Prices are artifically high due to phone company monopolies, but videoconferenceing is free over many instant messengers. It doesn't take that much bandwidth, and the cameras these days are more than up to the task. As VOIP companies start taking over corporate networks from traditional phone companies, expect the price of "officially supported" video phone calls will probably plummit.
Why would you need to make a key? A lock like that can probably just be raked with a little tension applied in about 10 seconds.
The faith that people put into locks like this is astounding. It is there just to stop people from casually pulling out the card. Anyone who really wants to swap cards still can with relative ease.
Within the industry, Blizzard has a reputation for being a massive meat-house with crushing grinds and soul-sucking levels of authority. That having been said, they're willing to iterate on a title for a tremendous amount of time until it is really done. Warcraft 3 is a great example of this: The game went through much balyhooed RPG and action iterations before returning to an RTS with RPG elements. Ghost is another example. It went through several developers (not just one development team) and many years before it was scrapped.
Blizzard has free reign within Vivendi. Nobody earns that much money that consistently without gaining self-determinism.
Sega, on the other hand, had their reputation completely shot to heck by the time the Dreamcast came around. After the mess that was the infighting between Sega US with 32x versus Sega JP with Saturn, (and the debacle that was the Sega CD), Sega's reputation was in shambles. The Saturn provided a super polished sprite-based experience, but was a nightmare to make those newfangled polygons and 3d games that everyone was so eager to try. It's no wonder that the Dreamcast did much better in Japan, where the Sega CD and the Saturn weren't complete failures and therefore weren't huge tarnishes upon SEGA's reputation.
WRT Nintendo, don't forget that the N64 (which was greatly overpromised and underdelivered) was competitive until a severe lack of titles became apparent. Titles were lacking largely because the cartridge mechanism provided such slim profit margins that it wasn't profitable to make games for, even ports. Many Nintendo fans got burned on this lack of titles, and many developers became wary of working with the big "N". Even then, the space afforded to disk-based games were just much more shiny and impressive. The GameCube suffered from the reputation that N had built up over the years.
Gnu privacy guard and truecrypt both work on a fundamental level because there is an asymmetrical informational pathway. A key piece of information is missing, which keeps the information locked away. Similarly, the person who has all of the information to decrypt the information is completely trusted.
On a theoretical level, you can't both give an open-source program all of the information required to decrypt a stream, and still prevent it from decryping the stream in ways that you don't approve of. The end user has all of the information required to have full control over the process.
At some point hardware attachments may make open-source DRM possible by hiding some of the required information. Or we may reach some compromise of semi-open DRM. But until then, Open Source DRM appears to violate a fundamental law of information science, much like perpetual motion machines violate thermodynamics.
OO and library support are *not* fundamental, when you're learning math, you do your addition and subtraction, before multiplication and addition.
OO is most definitely fundamental. Getting programmers to wrap their heads around inheritance and other important daily programming concepts is essential to being able to do anything with the damned things. Try partner programming with someone who has coded C for too long and you'll see what I mean.
Java cuts through one of the biggest initial hurdles to programming: Pointers. If that helps a person learn the structural difference between a linear search, a binary search tree, and a hash, then I'm all for it. Pointers are a pretty deep level of abstraction, and behing hit with those before people have a chance to wrap their heads around things like return values seems counterproductive.
Clearly the answer is that we should teach assembly. Otherwise, how are modern computer programmers to understand the importance of 15bit polynomial counters? The speed of assembly is unrivaled, so why deny our upcoming programmers the important knowledge of register juggling?
In fact, people should be wiring the little chips together manually. Want a zero? Desolder a vaccuum tube. Need a matrix operation? Sorry, we don't have enough rackmount space.
It would be like Star Wars. Billy Gates would be thrown into a cave on planet Ilum with a pick axe and a soldering gun, and would have to build a computer from raw ore and bits of plant life. Only then has he proven himself worthy of learning the secrets of "O of log n".
The value of a reputation is difficult to quantify. Blizzard has a great reputation because all of its games have been solid. But what is the value? A Blizzard title may sell just as many as many other titles that year. So suits may look at that and say that the reputation itself has no value. They they calculate the profits from a cheap spinoff title, and release Starcraft:Ghost.
Except they didn't, because they realized the value of their reputation. Ghost may have made a chunk of money in the short term, but it could have tarnished the reputation. And reputation ensures that the next great Blizzard game cuts through the noise and makes it to the top of people's shopping lists, instead of becoming yet another Ico or Beyond Good and Evil.
A reputation does not ensure a hit. But it does ensure that things deserving of becoming hits, do so.
GameSpot isn't selling advertising space. It's selling viewers. Its reputation as one of the better news sources out there draws in viewers. Selling off that reputation in the long term sells off viewers, and reduces what they have to sell.
Apple makes a good chunk of their money on end users buying their operating system interfaces. They then turn around and use that to improve their OS. Hence, why their stuff is so easy to use.
Microsoft makes a small amount on end user OS sales compared to OEM OS sales, MS Office sales, consulting, etc. And their interface can be infuriating.
eSATA is just SATA with bigger, less fragile connectors. As a standard, it's free to them to implement. eSata hard drives are just SATA hard drives plugged into the motherboard via a pair of pass-through connectors.
As a consumer, USB is much more convenient. But you're not going to be able to setup a RAID array of external USB drives, while you can do that with eSATA. And you can have an eSata port by just plugging some wires into an existing sata port on your mobo.
If we get rid of those, we'll be severing the last remaining connection to the machine's origins.
They're also one of the only things that continues to work well. They're impossible to put in upside-down. They're beefy and long-lasting. They hold together well. They're easy to modify to fit special needs. They're dirt-cheap to make.
You could argue that smaller Molex connectors would be nice, but you might be able to reduce the size by 50% in exchange for a lot of retooling and standard confusion. But you can't argue that Molex is underperforming or is otherwise becoming a bottleneck.
We've also got the same door size in the backs of the cases, but we don't have a compelling reason to make those smaller or larger. They just work.
I'm all for power on one unified cable internally and externally. But the hearty Molex connector deserves our respect.
He did more than just plan to break the law. He attempted to.
Making copies for other people would be attempting to break the law. His action, by itself, is not breaking the law.
If you put drugs into a gumball machine, and stuck the gumball machine somewhere, you haven't *actually* sold anything until you've actually sold something.
He had to do absolutely nothing to actually break the law except wait for someone to download one of those files.
And, as you so rightly point out, if nobody has downloaded the file then nobody has actually broken the law.
One of the potential offshoots of this argument relates to the ridiculous fines being leveled on offenders. If you put up a moderately sized MP3 collection... let's say 1,000 songs, you don't actually have to have all 1,000 downloaded to be hit with full infringement value. They may only have had 5 or 10 downloaded total. If you're a music fan (aka college student) and you put up 300,000 songs, at 175$ minimum fine per song you've got a 52 million dollar fine. If, however, it can only be shown that you've actually uploaded 100 songs to various people, you're only liable for 17k dollar fine. This is arguably a hell of a lot more in-balance. But even then, that keeps liability to the level of actual infringement, which seems more in keeping with regular legal practices. Of course, the RIAA have been known to go after 150k dollars per MP3, but that's still another issue.
You'll notice that with the 8 core cell processors on the PS3, only 7 are available to the console. This is because, to increase yield, one is assumed dead and burned off (instead of having to throw the entire chip out). This is only possible because each of the cores are identical... separate use chips on the same die lack this redundancy.
I'd guess we're looking at a situation where more identical cores become more and more common, but separate chips-on-die are out. They just create too many potentially fatal points of failure in the manufacturing process.
Of course, some day we may discover how to make these things without any failures after the initial mask. When that day comes, we'll probably see the entire computer on a chip.
The bigger your main die, the bigger % of chips need to be thrown out at the fab plant due to impurities in the manufacturing process. That lowers yield exponentially, and drives up price. At some point you have to split things off into separate chips or else your manufacturing output effectively falls to zero.
I know what you mean about intent, but it shouldn't be particularly hard to prove intent (and usage) for the sites / people that constitute the majority of the problem. For example, on ONE DAY a particular registrar decided to squat.info addresses for everyone who had registered a.com with them. In that one day, this one company registered just under a million addresses to itself, which it promptly parked. Domain parkers frequently have hundreds of thousands or more names.
The offenders worth going at are, at this point, so eggregious as to be indisputable.
While we're at it, Domain Speculation has to be made illegal (similar to spam). Name registration is a good-faith aggrement between computer operators to create a system that, theoretically, allows for the easiest access possible to information. Domain Speculators and parkers are just leeches. They take that gentlemen's agreement, then milk that for as much money as they can possibly squeeze out of legitimate, productive businesses.
Ever wonder where business.com, beerpongkit.com, catoutlet.com, blueray.tv, donatesperm.com, and tons of other names are not in use? According to Netcraft, nearly 50 million of the 100 million registered domain names out there are being "warehoused" like this. In other words, half of all names are people trying to milk other people out of their money while producing nothing at all.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true, isn't it? Your average terrorist is probably out there pirating software, cheating on their spouses, and experimenting with illegal narcotics.
Of course, terrorists also eat, go to the bathroom, and occasionally bathe too. That's because it's what people do. Correlation does not equal causality, unless you're very well paid to believe so.
Not that I disagree with the sentiment, but aren't patents basically to encourage and reward research? Therefore, isn't what is being protected, at core, the usage of knowledge?
It seems the question at hand is where a line should be drawn, not that there shouldn't be a line at all.
It is propaganda that moment anyone uses the term "Intellectual Property." The law recognizes no such thing. The law recognizes limitations on rights to duplicate *real* property, of attempting to pass as someone else, and a limited span of prevention of use of certain registered inventions. But nothing "intellectual" is ever owned.
>>Weeks? Are they throttling your connection down to dial-up speeds for that backup?
More or less, yes. I haven't determined exactly what things are throttled down to. I'd suspect an exponentially decreasing curve which flatlines somewhere around 39.9 GB, but as it was crawling at the beginning too I can't really say.
I'm a customer of one of the other "unlimited disk space" (for remote backup) companies. It is pretty clear that unlimited disk space does not equal unlimited bandwidth. Even on a very fat upstream, it has taken weeks to backup 40 GB.
* Cheap TV Phone
Available now. Prices are artifically high due to phone company monopolies, but videoconferenceing is free over many instant messengers. It doesn't take that much bandwidth, and the cameras these days are more than up to the task. As VOIP companies start taking over corporate networks from traditional phone companies, expect the price of "officially supported" video phone calls will probably plummit.
Why would you need to make a key? A lock like that can probably just be raked with a little tension applied in about 10 seconds.
The faith that people put into locks like this is astounding. It is there just to stop people from casually pulling out the card. Anyone who really wants to swap cards still can with relative ease.
Within the industry, Blizzard has a reputation for being a massive meat-house with crushing grinds and soul-sucking levels of authority. That having been said, they're willing to iterate on a title for a tremendous amount of time until it is really done. Warcraft 3 is a great example of this: The game went through much balyhooed RPG and action iterations before returning to an RTS with RPG elements. Ghost is another example. It went through several developers (not just one development team) and many years before it was scrapped.
Blizzard has free reign within Vivendi. Nobody earns that much money that consistently without gaining self-determinism.
Sega, on the other hand, had their reputation completely shot to heck by the time the Dreamcast came around. After the mess that was the infighting between Sega US with 32x versus Sega JP with Saturn, (and the debacle that was the Sega CD), Sega's reputation was in shambles. The Saturn provided a super polished sprite-based experience, but was a nightmare to make those newfangled polygons and 3d games that everyone was so eager to try. It's no wonder that the Dreamcast did much better in Japan, where the Sega CD and the Saturn weren't complete failures and therefore weren't huge tarnishes upon SEGA's reputation.
WRT Nintendo, don't forget that the N64 (which was greatly overpromised and underdelivered) was competitive until a severe lack of titles became apparent. Titles were lacking largely because the cartridge mechanism provided such slim profit margins that it wasn't profitable to make games for, even ports. Many Nintendo fans got burned on this lack of titles, and many developers became wary of working with the big "N". Even then, the space afforded to disk-based games were just much more shiny and impressive. The GameCube suffered from the reputation that N had built up over the years.
Gnu privacy guard and truecrypt both work on a fundamental level because there is an asymmetrical informational pathway. A key piece of information is missing, which keeps the information locked away. Similarly, the person who has all of the information to decrypt the information is completely trusted.
On a theoretical level, you can't both give an open-source program all of the information required to decrypt a stream, and still prevent it from decryping the stream in ways that you don't approve of. The end user has all of the information required to have full control over the process.
At some point hardware attachments may make open-source DRM possible by hiding some of the required information. Or we may reach some compromise of semi-open DRM. But until then, Open Source DRM appears to violate a fundamental law of information science, much like perpetual motion machines violate thermodynamics.
OO and library support are *not* fundamental, when you're learning math, you do your addition and subtraction, before multiplication and addition.
OO is most definitely fundamental. Getting programmers to wrap their heads around inheritance and other important daily programming concepts is essential to being able to do anything with the damned things. Try partner programming with someone who has coded C for too long and you'll see what I mean.
Java cuts through one of the biggest initial hurdles to programming: Pointers. If that helps a person learn the structural difference between a linear search, a binary search tree, and a hash, then I'm all for it. Pointers are a pretty deep level of abstraction, and behing hit with those before people have a chance to wrap their heads around things like return values seems counterproductive.
Clearly the answer is that we should teach assembly. Otherwise, how are modern computer programmers to understand the importance of 15bit polynomial counters? The speed of assembly is unrivaled, so why deny our upcoming programmers the important knowledge of register juggling?
In fact, people should be wiring the little chips together manually. Want a zero? Desolder a vaccuum tube. Need a matrix operation? Sorry, we don't have enough rackmount space.
It would be like Star Wars. Billy Gates would be thrown into a cave on planet Ilum with a pick axe and a soldering gun, and would have to build a computer from raw ore and bits of plant life. Only then has he proven himself worthy of learning the secrets of "O of log n".
Isn't Academia supposed to be academic?
The value of a reputation is difficult to quantify. Blizzard has a great reputation because all of its games have been solid. But what is the value? A Blizzard title may sell just as many as many other titles that year. So suits may look at that and say that the reputation itself has no value. They they calculate the profits from a cheap spinoff title, and release Starcraft:Ghost.
Except they didn't, because they realized the value of their reputation. Ghost may have made a chunk of money in the short term, but it could have tarnished the reputation. And reputation ensures that the next great Blizzard game cuts through the noise and makes it to the top of people's shopping lists, instead of becoming yet another Ico or Beyond Good and Evil.
A reputation does not ensure a hit. But it does ensure that things deserving of becoming hits, do so.
GameSpot isn't selling advertising space. It's selling viewers. Its reputation as one of the better news sources out there draws in viewers. Selling off that reputation in the long term sells off viewers, and reduces what they have to sell.
I hope GameSpot finds itself soon.
Apple makes a good chunk of their money on end users buying their operating system interfaces. They then turn around and use that to improve their OS. Hence, why their stuff is so easy to use.
Microsoft makes a small amount on end user OS sales compared to OEM OS sales, MS Office sales, consulting, etc. And their interface can be infuriating.
eSATA is just SATA with bigger, less fragile connectors. As a standard, it's free to them to implement. eSata hard drives are just SATA hard drives plugged into the motherboard via a pair of pass-through connectors.
As a consumer, USB is much more convenient. But you're not going to be able to setup a RAID array of external USB drives, while you can do that with eSATA. And you can have an eSata port by just plugging some wires into an existing sata port on your mobo.
If we get rid of those, we'll be severing the last remaining connection to the machine's origins.
They're also one of the only things that continues to work well. They're impossible to put in upside-down. They're beefy and long-lasting. They hold together well. They're easy to modify to fit special needs. They're dirt-cheap to make.
You could argue that smaller Molex connectors would be nice, but you might be able to reduce the size by 50% in exchange for a lot of retooling and standard confusion. But you can't argue that Molex is underperforming or is otherwise becoming a bottleneck.
We've also got the same door size in the backs of the cases, but we don't have a compelling reason to make those smaller or larger. They just work.
I'm all for power on one unified cable internally and externally. But the hearty Molex connector deserves our respect.
otherwise you might as well let Marion Jones back in with a terminator suit and a jet-pack.
"...And that, my son, was the best olympics ever."
He did more than just plan to break the law. He attempted to.
Making copies for other people would be attempting to break the law. His action, by itself, is not breaking the law.
If you put drugs into a gumball machine, and stuck the gumball machine somewhere, you haven't *actually* sold anything until you've actually sold something.
He had to do absolutely nothing to actually break the law except wait for someone to download one of those files.
And, as you so rightly point out, if nobody has downloaded the file then nobody has actually broken the law.
One of the potential offshoots of this argument relates to the ridiculous fines being leveled on offenders. If you put up a moderately sized MP3 collection... let's say 1,000 songs, you don't actually have to have all 1,000 downloaded to be hit with full infringement value. They may only have had 5 or 10 downloaded total. If you're a music fan (aka college student) and you put up 300,000 songs, at 175$ minimum fine per song you've got a 52 million dollar fine. If, however, it can only be shown that you've actually uploaded 100 songs to various people, you're only liable for 17k dollar fine. This is arguably a hell of a lot more in-balance. But even then, that keeps liability to the level of actual infringement, which seems more in keeping with regular legal practices. Of course, the RIAA have been known to go after 150k dollars per MP3, but that's still another issue.
You'll notice that with the 8 core cell processors on the PS3, only 7 are available to the console. This is because, to increase yield, one is assumed dead and burned off (instead of having to throw the entire chip out). This is only possible because each of the cores are identical... separate use chips on the same die lack this redundancy.
I'd guess we're looking at a situation where more identical cores become more and more common, but separate chips-on-die are out. They just create too many potentially fatal points of failure in the manufacturing process.
Of course, some day we may discover how to make these things without any failures after the initial mask. When that day comes, we'll probably see the entire computer on a chip.
The bigger your main die, the bigger % of chips need to be thrown out at the fab plant due to impurities in the manufacturing process. That lowers yield exponentially, and drives up price. At some point you have to split things off into separate chips or else your manufacturing output effectively falls to zero.
And then labor bosses can take your piece of paper, and check that you've voted the way they intended.
Which is not to say that is a risk currently in America, but it is one of the main reasons why we have a secret vote in the first place.
How long before the disgruntled sysadmin replaces the disgruntled postal worker in the zeitgeist?
Exactly as long as it takes for someone at ABC to go postal and delete Barbara Walter's files.
I know what you mean about intent, but it shouldn't be particularly hard to prove intent (and usage) for the sites / people that constitute the majority of the problem. For example, on ONE DAY a particular registrar decided to squat .info addresses for everyone who had registered a .com with them. In that one day, this one company registered just under a million addresses to itself, which it promptly parked. Domain parkers frequently have hundreds of thousands or more names.
The offenders worth going at are, at this point, so eggregious as to be indisputable.
You forgot....
* Completely kill the fun and independence of the open road for human fun. - No more jumping on your motorcycle for an adventure on the open road.
You really don't live in Boston, do you?
While we're at it, Domain Speculation has to be made illegal (similar to spam). Name registration is a good-faith aggrement between computer operators to create a system that, theoretically, allows for the easiest access possible to information. Domain Speculators and parkers are just leeches. They take that gentlemen's agreement, then milk that for as much money as they can possibly squeeze out of legitimate, productive businesses.
Ever wonder where business.com, beerpongkit.com, catoutlet.com, blueray.tv, donatesperm.com, and tons of other names are not in use? According to Netcraft, nearly 50 million of the 100 million registered domain names out there are being "warehoused" like this. In other words, half of all names are people trying to milk other people out of their money while producing nothing at all.
I for one am glad that someone peeking over my shoulder can buy a domain from their iPhone before I can finish clicking "buy".
Anyone that can type that fast on their iPhone deserves the domain.