Historically, real interest rates (the nominal interest rate - inflation) have been about 2%. So in 1000 years, that 93 cents will be worth about 370 million in inflation adjusted terms. A respectable sum.
Depending on inflation. Has there yet been a bank or currency which has lasted that long?
Piracy exists because the content producers and consumers do not agree on acceptable terms for the content. At one extreme, you have content producers wanting to be paid every time anyone watches their film. At the other extreme, you have consumers not wanting to pay at all. Some of these consumers are not able to pay anything, so they can be discounted from the discussion: No matter how you set the price or what conditions you impose, they will not pay.
You also have people who regardless of if they (on paper) could pay will either pirate or do without. These people can also be discounted...
Not to mention without a way for consumers to make copies, the producers will all tend towards the Disney vault model where they produce less new content and continue to squeeze unending profit from the old stuff.
Which is rather the opposite of what they are claiming as the reason they need this. Thing is that this kind of thing is rather more plausible than the idea that they are sitting on lots of content they just can't release without more DRM being available.
Whose bright idea was it to allow the capability of reprogramming hardware with what is supposed to be content?
In other contexts this would be considered either a bug or malware.
'd be interested in what else is possible. Can you reprogram channels? Disable mute? Disable the power switch?
Don't give them ideas, no doubt they'd want to disable mute and channel switching for unskipable parts of DVDs and commercial breaks given half a chance...
Yeah, but is that really a sufficient leap away from sudo to justify a patent? Most mainstream Linux distros already provide a graphical dialog box for sudo privileges, Windows already provides administrator authentication pop-ups; surely the idea of displaying different possible user accounts isn't worth a patent.
Especially since there are situations where such a list would not make much sense. e.g. where the number of possible accounts is large. Since such a system would allow an unprivileged user to find out about the privileges of other uses it may also be considered a security problem too.
Why does it have to be done legitimately and legally?
When the law is habitually incapable of solving a problem, it should be solved extralegally.
"The law" has plenty of weapons available. As well as being able to act "creativly" when it wants to. If the police can raid (and shut down) a business which might be using a few too many copies of some obscure piece of software they can most certainly do the same kind of thing to the likes of McColo.
Yeah, the Australian ISP that we go through (Telstra) actually forces everyone to use their SMTP servers to send email. According to a friend that works there, they do scan all these emails for spam content (can't confirm).
Which means they also provide a service for spammers to find out what is likely to get through spam filters. (Or at least through Telstra's).
Why is some obscure security firm doing the job that governments should have done 10 years ago?
Exactly we hear about "researchers" even broadcasters doing this. But never about regular law enforcement... Governments don't appear interested it dealing with this. Probably because it isn't the (alleged) profits of the entertainments industry being affected.
Nice rhetoric but, the consumers lose access to American* shows at reasonable prices.
The BBC might lose such access. The only way in which the public will lose access is if these shows are never broadcast and never made available on a transportable media. Which would kind of defeat the object of producing them in the first place. All it takes is one person to convert a broadcast/DVD into a bittorrent...
In the specific case of "rental", I'm always entertained by the comparison of the physical vs. the virtual world here. Specifically, the difference in distribution costs. Basically, rental makes no sense for the digital world in terms of distribution.
Video "rental" is effectivly a lending library. With a physical object (be it a book, video tape, DVD, etc) things such as tracking who has what, fines for overdue items are due to the limitation that only one person can have a copy at once. That dosn't stop people coming up with all sorts of creative ways to make a trivial to make copy behave like a physical item.
1) You're comparing a service (like wall painting), which is arranged for in advance and with terms understood to both parties, to - for example - a novel. Which the author risks his time to write, with no known buyers necessarily lined up (unless a publisher really wants to front some money, against future sales, just to keep in the author's good graces).
Yet people keep writing novels without any kind of publishing arrangement in place. Indeed some authors, e.g. J K Rowling, have great difficulty getting published. There are also authors (including published ones) who "give away" their novels. Including as readings, even audio plays (with a large cast).
It's about time we sat down & looked at this copyright/DRM lark seriously. In no other profession can you expect to earn money, 70 sodding years after you are dead, for 3 hours work.
Or indeed any amount of work your ancestors may have done for decades after they died.
Here's a response that the film and TV industries have never yet tried; how about letting people pay them money for legal downloads without DRM on the day of release? It's impossible to stop people downloading content, so you'd think they could at least experiment with letting people pay them for it rather than giving consumers who want unencumbered and timely content no choice but to pirate.
They'd first have to deal with the issue of wanting different release dates in different places. Otherwise the majority of potential viewers would still have the same choice of "pirate" or nothing.
The inland revenue service lost the personal details of 25 million people in the UK not so long ago, there have been hundreds more large scale (multi-million victim) data leaks since then and they expect us to now trust them to store all our personal contact data and suggest they don't even need to encrypt it?
It'll be on an encrypted DVD, with the key written on the disk:)
Labour government IT is a complete and utter catastrophe with not a single lesson learnt from the constant stream of mistakes.
That they're getting too much noise from creating a too indiscriminate collection of information, thereby shooting the signal-to-noise ratio through the roof?
What's "signal" and what's "noise" depends very much on exactly who is looking at the data.
I understand if it looks good on paper from a security perspective, but what about a practical standpoint? To me, this feels more and more like something that is bad both from a privacy perspective and in practice.
Assuming the actual intent is better law enforcement. Even on paper mass interception is a poor approach.
How can they possibly guarantee some future government might not use 42 days without charge and overly broad terror laws to intimidate otherwise lawful opposition?
It will be a suprise if this dosn't happen.
Being held for 42 days without charge will, for many people - lead to ruin even if they are just let go at the end of it. In 42 days, many people will have lost their jobs, their homes, and now have a cloud of suspicion hanging over them.
With the justification for this holding without charge making little sense. If someone really is part of a terrorist conspiracy arresting them will tip off any unknown conspirators. Indeed arresting people without proper investigation could actually precipitate a terrorist attack.
Well, they could just pass a law that requires you to surrender your crypto keys on demand. There are not enough people in who would be willing to go to jail just to maintain their privacy.
There are plenty of ways of communicating covertly which do not involve encryption, let alone encryption using commodity computers.
I talked to the government about this. The question I put to them was 'How?'.
It's pretty easy to install a secure private network - with any form of transport to go over it including voip, mail, irc, what-have-you.
It's not required for the "bad guys" to use "The Internet" in the first place or even to use it in the "expected way". Mass snooping is effectivly a "movie plot" approach. If the actual aim is to catch criminals then you need regular "detectives", if only to work out who and what needs spying on...
which means that the truly hardened criminals will create an online shopping cart in order to commit crimes. (like they don't already... to whit: money-laundering)
More likely they'll be running the banks, oh wait...
It is very hard to object to this kind of thing, because no-one is against catching criminals and terrorists if it makes us safer, right?
Only if you subscribe to the same false dichotomy as the advocates of such things. It's very questionable if mass snooping does much at all to help catch criminals. That's before even considering that criminals will, gain access to such data if it can be used in any way for criminal activities.
Surely though the police should be allowed to monitor everything?
No they need to investigate criminals. Unless their activities are properly supervised the last people they are going to be interested in are dangerous criminals.
The problem is that the police are human beings too and there are endless examples of them abusing their power.
This abuse also includes making themselves "look busy". Given a choice between dealing with a dangerous criminal gang and a peaceful political group the average police officer is likely to choose the latter. Which is why it's important to not give the police such a choice. Another kind of abuse is certain criminals being ignored because of who they are. e.g. police officers and MPs.
My local MP (Sarah McArthy Fry) made the argument that internet surveillance had been used to prevent a suicide, and so was entirely justified. Harsh as it may seem, one life is not enough justification.
How many suicides might result from people being spied on? This is something the likes of McArthy Fry tend to ignore.
If we banned cars we could save thousands of people from being killed or severely injured every year, but the bottom line is we consider the benefits of cars to outweigh those lives.
Also there is no way in which banning cars is likely to cause car "accidents". There are also likely to be many things other than banning to make car driving safer (not all of which will be politically correct, however).
When you start eating less to lose weight, your body enters a mode which is called "starvation" mode. In this mode, your metabolism slows down and starts consuming less calories than it was used to consume, and store much more than it used to do also. This is just a primitive "reflex" of your body. If you eat less, your body thinks that there is no more food available, so it prepares to survive in these rude conditions.
Note this also "trains" the body to store when when food is available. It may also be the case that such training also pushes the digestive system towards adsorbing everything it possibly can.
Bottom line, and to get back on topic, exercise and good eating habits do make you lose weight,
"Good eating habits" in this context is likely to include sending your body the message "food is abundent"...
It's a highly complex system. Nor does it "burn" anything.
How much you eat impacts how much you use; simply cutting calorie intake will just cause your resting metabolism to drop.
It's perfectly possible for a diet with less "calories" to actually contain the same, even a greater amount, of compounds which can be digested (and metabolised).
Putting stuff in your mouth is just step one. How you chew your food, how well it is digested, how active your metabolism is, all these will affect how much energy you actually get out of your food.
Most obviously with a fruit. Bite a seed and it becomes digestable. Swallow a seed whole and it might well make it out the other end viable. Puree the same fruit and all the seeds in it are digestable. Cooking will also affect the digestability of a food.
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Historically, real interest rates (the nominal interest rate - inflation) have been about 2%. So in 1000 years, that 93 cents will be worth about 370 million in inflation adjusted terms. A respectable sum.
Depending on inflation. Has there yet been a bank or currency which has lasted that long?
Piracy exists because the content producers and consumers do not agree on acceptable terms for the content. At one extreme, you have content producers wanting to be paid every time anyone watches their film. At the other extreme, you have consumers not wanting to pay at all. Some of these consumers are not able to pay anything, so they can be discounted from the discussion: No matter how you set the price or what conditions you impose, they will not pay.
You also have people who regardless of if they (on paper) could pay will either pirate or do without. These people can also be discounted...
Not to mention without a way for consumers to make copies, the producers will all tend towards the Disney vault model where they produce less new content and continue to squeeze unending profit from the old stuff.
Which is rather the opposite of what they are claiming as the reason they need this. Thing is that this kind of thing is rather more plausible than the idea that they are sitting on lots of content they just can't release without more DRM being available.
Whose bright idea was it to allow the capability of reprogramming hardware with what is supposed to be content?
In other contexts this would be considered either a bug or malware.
'd be interested in what else is possible. Can you reprogram channels? Disable mute? Disable the power switch?
Don't give them ideas, no doubt they'd want to disable mute and channel switching for unskipable parts of DVDs and commercial breaks given half a chance...
Yeah, but is that really a sufficient leap away from sudo to justify a patent? Most mainstream Linux distros already provide a graphical dialog box for sudo privileges, Windows already provides administrator authentication pop-ups; surely the idea of displaying different possible user accounts isn't worth a patent.
Especially since there are situations where such a list would not make much sense. e.g. where the number of possible accounts is large. Since such a system would allow an unprivileged user to find out about the privileges of other uses it may also be considered a security problem too.
Why does it have to be done legitimately and legally?
When the law is habitually incapable of solving a problem, it should be solved extralegally.
"The law" has plenty of weapons available. As well as being able to act "creativly" when it wants to.
If the police can raid (and shut down) a business which might be using a few too many copies of some obscure piece of software they can most certainly do the same kind of thing to the likes of McColo.
Yeah, the Australian ISP that we go through (Telstra) actually forces everyone to use their SMTP servers to send email. According to a friend that works there, they do scan all these emails for spam content (can't confirm).
Which means they also provide a service for spammers to find out what is likely to get through spam filters. (Or at least through Telstra's).
Why is some obscure security firm doing the job that governments should have done 10 years ago?
Exactly we hear about "researchers" even broadcasters doing this. But never about regular law enforcement...
Governments don't appear interested it dealing with this. Probably because it isn't the (alleged) profits of the entertainments industry being affected.
Nice rhetoric but, the consumers lose access to American* shows at reasonable prices.
The BBC might lose such access. The only way in which the public will lose access is if these shows are never broadcast and never made available on a transportable media. Which would kind of defeat the object of producing them in the first place.
All it takes is one person to convert a broadcast/DVD into a bittorrent...
In the specific case of "rental", I'm always entertained by the comparison of the physical vs. the virtual world here. Specifically, the difference in distribution costs. Basically, rental makes no sense for the digital world in terms of distribution.
Video "rental" is effectivly a lending library. With a physical object (be it a book, video tape, DVD, etc) things such as tracking who has what, fines for overdue items are due to the limitation that only one person can have a copy at once.
That dosn't stop people coming up with all sorts of creative ways to make a trivial to make copy behave like a physical item.
1) You're comparing a service (like wall painting), which is arranged for in advance and with terms understood to both parties, to - for example - a novel. Which the author risks his time to write, with no known buyers necessarily lined up (unless a publisher really wants to front some money, against future sales, just to keep in the author's good graces).
Yet people keep writing novels without any kind of publishing arrangement in place. Indeed some authors, e.g. J K Rowling, have great difficulty getting published.
There are also authors (including published ones) who "give away" their novels. Including as readings, even audio plays (with a large cast).
It's about time we sat down & looked at this copyright/DRM lark seriously. In no other profession can you expect to earn money, 70 sodding years after you are dead, for 3 hours work.
Or indeed any amount of work your ancestors may have done for decades after they died.
Here's a response that the film and TV industries have never yet tried; how about letting people pay them money for legal downloads without DRM on the day of release? It's impossible to stop people downloading content, so you'd think they could at least experiment with letting people pay them for it rather than giving consumers who want unencumbered and timely content no choice but to pirate.
They'd first have to deal with the issue of wanting different release dates in different places. Otherwise the majority of potential viewers would still have the same choice of "pirate" or nothing.
A normal society would completely reject the idea that it has to be continuously monitored for its own safety.
A half sane society would want to know "Who watches the watchers?" (as well as "Who isn't monitored?")
The inland revenue service lost the personal details of 25 million people in the UK not so long ago, there have been hundreds more large scale (multi-million victim) data leaks since then and they expect us to now trust them to store all our personal contact data and suggest they don't even need to encrypt it?
:)
It'll be on an encrypted DVD, with the key written on the disk
Labour government IT is a complete and utter catastrophe with not a single lesson learnt from the constant stream of mistakes.
As if Cameron's lot would be any better...
That they're getting too much noise from creating a too indiscriminate collection of information, thereby shooting the signal-to-noise ratio through the roof?
What's "signal" and what's "noise" depends very much on exactly who is looking at the data.
I understand if it looks good on paper from a security perspective, but what about a practical standpoint? To me, this feels more and more like something that is bad both from a privacy perspective and in practice.
Assuming the actual intent is better law enforcement. Even on paper mass interception is a poor approach.
How can they possibly guarantee some future government might not use 42 days without charge and overly broad terror laws to intimidate otherwise lawful opposition?
It will be a suprise if this dosn't happen.
Being held for 42 days without charge will, for many people - lead to ruin even if they are just let go at the end of it. In 42 days, many people will have lost their jobs, their homes, and now have a cloud of suspicion hanging over them.
With the justification for this holding without charge making little sense. If someone really is part of a terrorist conspiracy arresting them will tip off any unknown conspirators. Indeed arresting people without proper investigation could actually precipitate a terrorist attack.
Well, they could just pass a law that requires you to surrender your crypto keys on demand. There are not enough people in who would be willing to go to jail just to maintain their privacy.
There are plenty of ways of communicating covertly which do not involve encryption, let alone encryption using commodity computers.
I talked to the government about this. The question I put to them was 'How?'. It's pretty easy to install a secure private network - with any form of transport to go over it including voip, mail, irc, what-have-you.
It's not required for the "bad guys" to use "The Internet" in the first place or even to use it in the "expected way".
Mass snooping is effectivly a "movie plot" approach. If the actual aim is to catch criminals then you need regular "detectives", if only to work out who and what needs spying on...
which means that the truly hardened criminals will create an online shopping cart in order to commit crimes. (like they don't already... to whit: money-laundering)
More likely they'll be running the banks, oh wait...
It is very hard to object to this kind of thing, because no-one is against catching criminals and terrorists if it makes us safer, right?
Only if you subscribe to the same false dichotomy as the advocates of such things. It's very questionable if mass snooping does much at all to help catch criminals. That's before even considering that criminals will, gain access to such data if it can be used in any way for criminal activities.
Surely though the police should be allowed to monitor everything?
No they need to investigate criminals. Unless their activities are properly supervised the last people they are going to be interested in are dangerous criminals.
The problem is that the police are human beings too and there are endless examples of them abusing their power.
This abuse also includes making themselves "look busy". Given a choice between dealing with a dangerous criminal gang and a peaceful political group the average police officer is likely to choose the latter. Which is why it's important to not give the police such a choice. Another kind of abuse is certain criminals being ignored because of who they are. e.g. police officers and MPs.
My local MP (Sarah McArthy Fry) made the argument that internet surveillance had been used to prevent a suicide, and so was entirely justified. Harsh as it may seem, one life is not enough justification.
How many suicides might result from people being spied on? This is something the likes of McArthy Fry tend to ignore.
If we banned cars we could save thousands of people from being killed or severely injured every year, but the bottom line is we consider the benefits of cars to outweigh those lives.
Also there is no way in which banning cars is likely to cause car "accidents". There are also likely to be many things other than banning to make car driving safer (not all of which will be politically correct, however).
When you start eating less to lose weight, your body enters a mode which is called "starvation" mode. In this mode, your metabolism slows down and starts consuming less calories than it was used to consume, and store much more than it used to do also. This is just a primitive "reflex" of your body. If you eat less, your body thinks that there is no more food available, so it prepares to survive in these rude conditions.
Note this also "trains" the body to store when when food is available. It may also be the case that such training also pushes the digestive system towards adsorbing everything it possibly can.
Bottom line, and to get back on topic, exercise and good eating habits do make you lose weight,
"Good eating habits" in this context is likely to include sending your body the message "food is abundent"...
How you chew your food matters? Seriously?
Food which has been chewed well allows digestive enzymes easier access. Note that plenty of processed food has been effectivly "pre chewed"
Food is food no matter how you chew it.
How much nutrient can your body extract from an undamaged tomato seed?
Your body is not a simple machine.
It's a highly complex system. Nor does it "burn" anything.
How much you eat impacts how much you use; simply cutting calorie intake will just cause your resting metabolism to drop.
It's perfectly possible for a diet with less "calories" to actually contain the same, even a greater amount, of compounds which can be digested (and metabolised).
Putting stuff in your mouth is just step one. How you chew your food, how well it is digested, how active your metabolism is, all these will affect how much energy you actually get out of your food.
Most obviously with a fruit. Bite a seed and it becomes digestable. Swallow a seed whole and it might well make it out the other end viable. Puree the same fruit and all the seeds in it are digestable. Cooking will also affect the digestability of a food.