On the other hand, without patents, there would be nothing to stop Company A spending years and millions of pounds developing something, then brining it to market, then watching Company B spending a couple of months and a few thousand pounds reverse engineering it and bringing their own version to market at a reduced price.
Ahh... but this is exactly the argument we're talking about as being invalid.
If company B is one of the "big guys", they can use their patent portfolio to force a cross-licensing agreement anyway. Company B being one of the "big guys" is one of the key points to the argument, because they're the only ones who can really leverage a superior production set up to out-compete Company A's first to market advantage.
Very simply, patents only have one real world effect: They segment the market into companies big enough to force cross licensing agreements (who get to use all the patented ideas) and smaller companies and individuals (who get to use almost none of the patented ideas). In most fields, it's impossible to build a useful device without using multiple ideas. Conceptually, this means that only big companies can safely bring products to market - in the real world, the large companies chose to let smaller companies play too and generally don't sue them, content in the knowledge that they can crush them like bugs with their numerous patents if they should ever become a real threat.
The artistic works of Humanity are an important element of our cultural heritage. Naturally, they are a public resource - available to all to enjoy, share, and use as a basis for new works of art.
Due to our specific history, we currently have copyright law. This class of law was instituted for one reason, preserved for others, and is promoted for still other reasons. In any case, the basic premise today is that authors are granted exclusive right to the profits from their works for a limited time in order to promote the creation of such works. After this limited time has passed, these works are to revert to their natural state - the public domain.
Copyright law today has overreached its basis. Instead of providing a monopoly on profits, it squelches free cultural exchange. Instead of lasting for a limited time, it lasts for nearly seven generations.
Very simply, NO ONE has the right to say that an artistic work cannot be shared and enjoyed. Not the author, not the publisher, not the government. Artistic works are part of our shared cultural heritage; if the author didn't want people to enjoy their work, they shouldn't have created it.
You're right. It would make more sense to have no "accept this certificate popup at all" and to create a new "encrypted but not authenticated" icon to replace the lock.
Based on our current understanding of physics and information theory, current high end encryption algorithms can *never* be cracked by brute force. Even with quantum computers this is extremely unlikely to change.
Given just a HD-DVD and no encryption key, assuming that AES doesn't have some horrible unexpected security hole, you're not going to get at the movie. It's true that *given a functional HD-DVD player*, getting the data is reasonably straightforward, but that's just an argument on the side of allowing circumvention today.
Even quantum computers don't help - they're expected to help the factoring problem some (and thus force us to go to 8192 bit RSA keys), but they don't win you much attacking symmetric crypto algorithms.
Note the difference between saving and investing. Further note the importance of other choices that people can make (i.e. Buy vs. Rent, City vs. Suburb vs. City with better public transportation, Car vs. No Car, when to have kids).
Sure, some people just get fucked. That always happens. But... I know enough people who make obvious wrong choices and then complain that it's someone else's fault when they have financial trouble. If you commute an hour to make below the living wage and refuse to move away from the upscale suburb you already can't afford, perhaps it's not time to have a third kid and lease a second SUV?
I don't believe I am overstating the threat to say that widespread DRM is a threat to the potential survival of human knowledge through natural disasters and war. Not only should DRM not receive additional legal protections, it should not be legally allowed.
Thank you. This is a key point that should not be ignored in the discussion. It doesn't even require a war or natural disaster, just the passage of time. After a major technology shift (for whatever reason), rebuilding a device to read a format like HD-DVD or BD-ROM is going to be hard enough - we don't want the historians (or even archaeologists) to run into mathematically unbreakable cryptography that utterly prevents them from having access to the only surviving copy of some work of 2010 popular literature.
Also remember that optical media degrades. If a CD degrades, you'll lose one song at a time or you'll have to "reconstruct" the lost bits. If a DVD or other DRM-corrupted media degrades, once you've lost even a couple of bits it becomes an utter nightmare to recover any data at all. If you lose ~50 bits in a row, the whole disk might be gone because the decryption process becomes impossible. And that's all assuming you *have* the title key.
remember, we are talking about a perfect world where pixy dust and ponies solve everything
His reference to Gödel's theorem covers this... any such "perfect world" is likely unrelated to the real world and has thus shifted the burden of proof to you to demonstrate that your perfect world model applies to the real world version of your argument.
Investing isn't a game for people who can't pay their day to day expenses. Withdrawing money from your 401k for the MRI may have been your only choice, but it wasn't a very effective way to make money.
The funny thing is that people don't even need to consciously value the quality difference in order to drive a move to HD. The fact of the matter is, in 10 years you won't be able to buy a full-size TV (i.e. bigger than 15") that doesn't do 1080p. They just won't be for sale, because the higher resolution screens will be cheaper to make due to production volume.
You're probably right that video on demand services will probably actually be shipping worse-than-1080p content for a long time. I expect that people will get used to 1080p content from non-VOD sources and see lower resolution / highly compressed content as "fuzzy" and "blurry" - on demand services will start advertising "bitrate", and that will drive bandwidth demand, and that will make it cheaper to chose better quality video.
There is some question as to how long it will take, and some more question about whether or not that bandwidth will be bidirectional and general purpose, but by 2020 I expect that 1080p video on demand will be ubiquitous.
Step 1: Announce stricter regulations that will apply to everyone that will go into effect in a year or two. Make it clear that this "problem" can't be "solved" with lobbying or lawsuits.
Step 2: Once the regulations go into effect, fine anyone who isn't in compliance an amount such that it's obviously cheaper to comply (make it come out to around the cost to upgrade in fines every year or two).
Step 3: Let the market do its work from there. If companies fail, so be it. If prices go up, that's ok - it'll draw new players into the market. Don't budge to political pressure to interfere further unless the effects are really, really different than what was expected.
The power companies make exactly that choice that is most money-efficient for them. Currently, building new plants *at all* is money inefficient because of the requirement to include *every* technology that anyone can even imagine that might reduce pollution. Expanding existing plants (where it's actually much harder to include *any* new clean technologies) is also hard, but the power companies have discovered that by committing to one "clean technology" (whatever is cheapest), they can usually get a license to expand an old dirty plant.
Solving this problem is reasonably simple as an engineering/economic problem, but unfortunately it's a political problem - and there's no good answer that works in political time (4-6 years) and appeases enough special interest groups.
Very simply, there's no excuse to be fucking around with thermal reactors at all. With their 0.5% efficiency, we'll manage to convert all the easily accessible uranium into highly radioactive spent fuel inside my lifetime. That's strictly a bad deal. Using a decent fast reactor design, we could power the world on spent fuel alone until my grandchildren die of old age. If there are still safety issues then we should solve the engineering problems, but we'd be better off burning coal than sticking with thermal reactor designs.
That's strictly false. The jump to HD video is a *huge* and *blatantly obvious* quality increase. There is a significant segment of non-computer-geek "home theater enthusiasts" who are acting as early adopters for this technology. Just because everyone in the world hasn't replaced their TVs in a couple years doesn't mean that HD video equipment "isn't catching on".
HDTV sales right now is a classic case of the effect of price on demand. Right now the price difference is still high enough that people will chose to buy a $150 SDTV set over a $550 HDTV set. As the price of HDTV sets approaches the price of SDTV sets, more people will chose HDTV sets when they buy a new TV. Eventually, the prices will be about the same and manufacturers will stop making SDTV sets at all - the same thing that has happened with mid-range CRT computer monitors (they don't exist any more, you can get a sub-$100 CRT with crappy specs or a really nice CRT, but the mid-range models can't compete with low-end LCDs).
There's occasionally HD (1080i) porn on torrent sites. I'm not sure that having that clear a view of some guy's nut hairs and ass pimples is really a good deal, but the stuff's available.
Wait a second? You think that there are more guys with a wife and three kids than there are 35 year old single guys with a decent job? My guess is that the numbers are pretty similar, but that the second category drives high end tech more.
Even in the "Wife and 3 Kids" category, I still wouldn't rule out high-def porn purchases. I mean... some couples even (*gasp*) watch porn together.
I'm not suggesting that the only hierarchy be a location-based hierarchy, but a flat namespace doesn't work for everything either. For example, having personal websites at http://www.johnsmith.com/ stops working *really fast*. Remember that http://harrysblog.effingham.il.us/ is still accessible from the whole world - it just means that Harry from detroit can have a blog named harrysblog too (at http://harrysblog.detroit.mi.us/). And if that's the obvious place for a personal blog, then all you have to remember is "harrysblog detroit", assuming you can remember what state Detroit is in (not hard).
But... no one's offering.town.state.us domains, and people keep adding ad-hoc random top level domains, so what we're going to end up with is having to remember an arbitrary string with at least one dot in it. That's a way worse deal than some couple of well-defined hierarchies.
The world is a big place, and different websites have different exposure levels. The.com domain is excellent for international trademarks. In some cases, the properties of the.com domain have *created* international trademarks. That's great. That still doesn't mean that "http://www.rockportusa.com" is a better name for the Rockport, MA chamber of commerce webpage than something like "http://shop.rockport.ma.us/". Sure, it might seem hard to remember - that's because you're not used to it. If you *assumed* that local websites would be in a town.state.us hierarchy, that would be the obvious place for that site. I definitely think that's easier to remember than "rockportusa.com" or some shit like "shop-rockport.travel".
Overcomplex? A Secure ID fob is better? You've completely misunderstood the suggestion.
Consider the following similar suggestion (this version allows limited offline payments): The customer gets a device that looks like one of the USB storage keyfobs, except it has a 2 line text display on it and two buttons: Accept and Reject. You plug it into the terminal, and you see on the 2 line display the amount of the charge and the recipient (verified in the device by public key crypto). The user presses accept on their fob, and the payment is made. Fraud by the merchant becomes basically impossible, as long as the user is the one pressing the button on his key. You can provide limited protection against a stolen fob by having a PIN pad on the merchant terminal.
Do you keep all your files in your computer in the root directory of the filesysystem (i.e. "/" on Unix or "C:\" on Windows), or do you use subdirectories to organize things? I'd be much more interested in http://www.joes-pizza.lowell.ma.us/ than in http://www.joes-pizza.com/
There was time before that hole was introduced into the OpenBSD codebase, and there have been years since it was patched. Now, I can't conclusively prove that no hole currently exists for OpenBSD, but I have demonstrated my point that different programs have different levels of security... and that the design choices of the programmers are relevant to that.
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Ahh... but this is exactly the argument we're talking about as being invalid.
If company B is one of the "big guys", they can use their patent portfolio to force a cross-licensing agreement anyway. Company B being one of the "big guys" is one of the key points to the argument, because they're the only ones who can really leverage a superior production set up to out-compete Company A's first to market advantage.
Very simply, patents only have one real world effect: They segment the market into companies big enough to force cross licensing agreements (who get to use all the patented ideas) and smaller companies and individuals (who get to use almost none of the patented ideas). In most fields, it's impossible to build a useful device without using multiple ideas. Conceptually, this means that only big companies can safely bring products to market - in the real world, the large companies chose to let smaller companies play too and generally don't sue them, content in the knowledge that they can crush them like bugs with their numerous patents if they should ever become a real threat.
The artistic works of Humanity are an important element of our cultural heritage. Naturally, they are a public resource - available to all to enjoy, share, and use as a basis for new works of art.
Due to our specific history, we currently have copyright law. This class of law was instituted for one reason, preserved for others, and is promoted for still other reasons. In any case, the basic premise today is that authors are granted exclusive right to the profits from their works for a limited time in order to promote the creation of such works. After this limited time has passed, these works are to revert to their natural state - the public domain.
Copyright law today has overreached its basis. Instead of providing a monopoly on profits, it squelches free cultural exchange. Instead of lasting for a limited time, it lasts for nearly seven generations.
Very simply, NO ONE has the right to say that an artistic work cannot be shared and enjoyed. Not the author, not the publisher, not the government. Artistic works are part of our shared cultural heritage; if the author didn't want people to enjoy their work, they shouldn't have created it.
You're right. It would make more sense to have no "accept this certificate popup at all" and to create a new "encrypted but not authenticated" icon to replace the lock.
Absolutely wrong.
Based on our current understanding of physics and information theory, current high end encryption algorithms can *never* be cracked by brute force. Even with quantum computers this is extremely unlikely to change.
Given just a HD-DVD and no encryption key, assuming that AES doesn't have some horrible unexpected security hole, you're not going to get at the movie. It's true that *given a functional HD-DVD player*, getting the data is reasonably straightforward, but that's just an argument on the side of allowing circumvention today.
Even quantum computers don't help - they're expected to help the factoring problem some (and thus force us to go to 8192 bit RSA keys), but they don't win you much attacking symmetric crypto algorithms.
You say this as if there was something wrong with fixing the DRM and sharing a clean and useful copy of the data...
Note the difference between saving and investing. Further note the importance of other choices that people can make (i.e. Buy vs. Rent, City vs. Suburb vs. City with better public transportation, Car vs. No Car, when to have kids).
Sure, some people just get fucked. That always happens. But... I know enough people who make obvious wrong choices and then complain that it's someone else's fault when they have financial trouble. If you commute an hour to make below the living wage and refuse to move away from the upscale suburb you already can't afford, perhaps it's not time to have a third kid and lease a second SUV?
Thank you. This is a key point that should not be ignored in the discussion. It doesn't even require a war or natural disaster, just the passage of time. After a major technology shift (for whatever reason), rebuilding a device to read a format like HD-DVD or BD-ROM is going to be hard enough - we don't want the historians (or even archaeologists) to run into mathematically unbreakable cryptography that utterly prevents them from having access to the only surviving copy of some work of 2010 popular literature.
Also remember that optical media degrades. If a CD degrades, you'll lose one song at a time or you'll have to "reconstruct" the lost bits. If a DVD or other DRM-corrupted media degrades, once you've lost even a couple of bits it becomes an utter nightmare to recover any data at all. If you lose ~50 bits in a row, the whole disk might be gone because the decryption process becomes impossible. And that's all assuming you *have* the title key.
His reference to Gödel's theorem covers this... any such "perfect world" is likely unrelated to the real world and has thus shifted the burden of proof to you to demonstrate that your perfect world model applies to the real world version of your argument.
Investing isn't a game for people who can't pay their day to day expenses. Withdrawing money from your 401k for the MRI may have been your only choice, but it wasn't a very effective way to make money.
The funny thing is that people don't even need to consciously value the quality difference in order to drive a move to HD. The fact of the matter is, in 10 years you won't be able to buy a full-size TV (i.e. bigger than 15") that doesn't do 1080p. They just won't be for sale, because the higher resolution screens will be cheaper to make due to production volume.
You're probably right that video on demand services will probably actually be shipping worse-than-1080p content for a long time. I expect that people will get used to 1080p content from non-VOD sources and see lower resolution / highly compressed content as "fuzzy" and "blurry" - on demand services will start advertising "bitrate", and that will drive bandwidth demand, and that will make it cheaper to chose better quality video.
There is some question as to how long it will take, and some more question about whether or not that bandwidth will be bidirectional and general purpose, but by 2020 I expect that 1080p video on demand will be ubiquitous.
Step 1: Announce stricter regulations that will apply to everyone that will go into effect in a year or two. Make it clear that this "problem" can't be "solved" with lobbying or lawsuits.
Step 2: Once the regulations go into effect, fine anyone who isn't in compliance an amount such that it's obviously cheaper to comply (make it come out to around the cost to upgrade in fines every year or two).
Step 3: Let the market do its work from there. If companies fail, so be it. If prices go up, that's ok - it'll draw new players into the market. Don't budge to political pressure to interfere further unless the effects are really, really different than what was expected.
"When grandchildren die of old age" is a horrible time reference. Let's go for "hundreds of years from now, at least".
The power companies make exactly that choice that is most money-efficient for them. Currently, building new plants *at all* is money inefficient because of the requirement to include *every* technology that anyone can even imagine that might reduce pollution. Expanding existing plants (where it's actually much harder to include *any* new clean technologies) is also hard, but the power companies have discovered that by committing to one "clean technology" (whatever is cheapest), they can usually get a license to expand an old dirty plant.
Solving this problem is reasonably simple as an engineering/economic problem, but unfortunately it's a political problem - and there's no good answer that works in political time (4-6 years) and appeases enough special interest groups.
Very simply, there's no excuse to be fucking around with thermal reactors at all. With their 0.5% efficiency, we'll manage to convert all the easily accessible uranium into highly radioactive spent fuel inside my lifetime. That's strictly a bad deal. Using a decent fast reactor design, we could power the world on spent fuel alone until my grandchildren die of old age. If there are still safety issues then we should solve the engineering problems, but we'd be better off burning coal than sticking with thermal reactor designs.
That's strictly false. The jump to HD video is a *huge* and *blatantly obvious* quality increase. There is a significant segment of non-computer-geek "home theater enthusiasts" who are acting as early adopters for this technology. Just because everyone in the world hasn't replaced their TVs in a couple years doesn't mean that HD video equipment "isn't catching on".
HDTV sales right now is a classic case of the effect of price on demand. Right now the price difference is still high enough that people will chose to buy a $150 SDTV set over a $550 HDTV set. As the price of HDTV sets approaches the price of SDTV sets, more people will chose HDTV sets when they buy a new TV. Eventually, the prices will be about the same and manufacturers will stop making SDTV sets at all - the same thing that has happened with mid-range CRT computer monitors (they don't exist any more, you can get a sub-$100 CRT with crappy specs or a really nice CRT, but the mid-range models can't compete with low-end LCDs).
There's occasionally HD (1080i) porn on torrent sites. I'm not sure that having that clear a view of some guy's nut hairs and ass pimples is really a good deal, but the stuff's available.
Wait a second? You think that there are more guys with a wife and three kids than there are 35 year old single guys with a decent job? My guess is that the numbers are pretty similar, but that the second category drives high end tech more.
Even in the "Wife and 3 Kids" category, I still wouldn't rule out high-def porn purchases. I mean... some couples even (*gasp*) watch porn together.
I'm not suggesting that the only hierarchy be a location-based hierarchy, but a flat namespace doesn't work for everything either. For example, having personal websites at http://www.johnsmith.com/ stops working *really fast*. Remember that http://harrysblog.effingham.il.us/ is still accessible from the whole world - it just means that Harry from detroit can have a blog named harrysblog too (at http://harrysblog.detroit.mi.us/). And if that's the obvious place for a personal blog, then all you have to remember is "harrysblog detroit", assuming you can remember what state Detroit is in (not hard).
But... no one's offering .town.state.us domains, and people keep adding ad-hoc random top level domains, so what we're going to end up with is having to remember an arbitrary string with at least one dot in it. That's a way worse deal than some couple of well-defined hierarchies.
The world is a big place, and different websites have different exposure levels. The .com domain is excellent for international trademarks. In some cases, the properties of the .com domain have *created* international trademarks. That's great. That still doesn't mean that "http://www.rockportusa.com" is a better name for the Rockport, MA chamber of commerce webpage than something like "http://shop.rockport.ma.us/". Sure, it might seem hard to remember - that's because you're not used to it. If you *assumed* that local websites would be in a town.state.us hierarchy, that would be the obvious place for that site. I definitely think that's easier to remember than "rockportusa.com" or some shit like "shop-rockport.travel".
Have you considered that in some foreign countries they speak languages other than english?
Overcomplex? A Secure ID fob is better? You've completely misunderstood the suggestion.
Consider the following similar suggestion (this version allows limited offline payments): The customer gets a device that looks like one of the USB storage keyfobs, except it has a 2 line text display on it and two buttons: Accept and Reject. You plug it into the terminal, and you see on the 2 line display the amount of the charge and the recipient (verified in the device by public key crypto). The user presses accept on their fob, and the payment is made. Fraud by the merchant becomes basically impossible, as long as the user is the one pressing the button on his key. You can provide limited protection against a stolen fob by having a PIN pad on the merchant terminal.
Do you keep all your files in your computer in the root directory of the filesysystem (i.e. "/" on Unix or "C:\" on Windows), or do you use subdirectories to organize things? I'd be much more interested in http://www.joes-pizza.lowell.ma.us/ than in http://www.joes-pizza.com/
There was time before that hole was introduced into the OpenBSD codebase, and there have been years since it was patched. Now, I can't conclusively prove that no hole currently exists for OpenBSD, but I have demonstrated my point that different programs have different levels of security... and that the design choices of the programmers are relevant to that.