Case in point. I irreparably scratched a DVD from Fox (The Phantom Menace). My only recourse is to buy replacement media and a second license to view the movie. Clearly that license is the expensive part. I don't see how this is "fair."
So if we had a DRM system, something like Palladium, you could download that movie, then if your file got corrupted or accidentally deleted, the system could be designed so that you could download it again. You'd only have to pay for it once. That's how some of the music download services work.
The DRM controls would prevent you from making copies of the movie for other people, so the studio's rights would be protected, while you could be protected against problems like you describe.
Does this mean you would endorse a DRM system like Palladium?
If advanced alien civilizations existed in numbers significant enough for us to hear their radio transmissions, the probability is overwhelming that at least one in a nearby galaxy would have embarked on a program of colonization. Evolution favors organisms which have a drive to expand (otherwise they would have been out-competed). Technological civilizations inherit their evolutionary drives and will share this expansionist tendency.
Expansion can be performed at a significant fraction of the speed of light. von Neumann machines - self-replicating, nanotech-based robotic spacecraft - can fly to a new system, make copies for exploration and colonization, and more copies which get sent off to other stars, all using local system resources. An entire galaxy or even group of galaxies can be explored and colonized at perhaps a tenth the speed of light. A million years will be enough to cover all the stars in a galaxy; a few times that will cover the local group of galaxies.
Once a solar system is inhabited by a technological civilization, its most important goal will be to manage the primary resource, the energy production of the central star. Stars in unmodified systems radiate 99+% of their energy wastefully into empty space. A civilization will want to capture that energy and put it to work, by building a Dyson sphere or some similar structures to collect the wasted light and heat from the star. Star systems inhabited by advanced civilizations will look very different from the ones we see in our galaxy.
The galaxy is ten billion years old. Our technological culture is no more than a few thousand years old. If other technological species have arisen, chances are statistically overwhelming that they are at least tens or hundreds of millions of years ahead of us. This means that they will have had ample time to fully explore, colonize and even modify the entire galaxy.
The only plausible way this can't happen is if there are no other technological civilizations out there. And in that case, SETI won't work, we won't find any signals. That's the only reasonable conclusion we can draw from the fact that we live in a galaxy unmodified by technology.
If the galaxy were so full of advanced life that SETI would work, they'd be here, and everywhere else in the galaxy, by now. Therefore SETI can't work.
Definition of digital media device
on
Fritz's Hit List
·
· Score: 2
(3) DIGITAL MEDIA DEVICE. -- The term "digital media device" means any hardware or software that --
(A) reproduces copyrighted works in digital form;
(B) converts copyrighted works in digital form into a form whereby the images and sounds are visible or audible; or
(C) retrieves or accesses copyrighted works in digital form and transfers or makes available for transfer such works to hardware or software described in subparagraph (B).
Now how do you get from this to Barbie? She's not making copyrighted works audible, other than her own recorded voice!
And why has no one pointed out that the bill fails to say anything about what the security standards are required to do?
But geologist Roger Buick of the University of Washington in Seattle told the same publication that a model created by Martinez-Frias and his team showing ice can form on a clear day was an "important advance in that it thoroughly documents and provides an explanation for a spectacular phenomenon"
Take a look at Roger Buick. I don't think I want to argue with him. But as a specialist in Pre-Cambrian Life, Environments, and Astrobiology it's not clear that he would know much about cloud formation.
If you wear contact lenses, you're already used to touching your eyeballs and having stuff put on there, so the equipment is no big deal. I had it done too, a couple of years ago, and the procedure was nothing. Getting a filling at the dentist's is 10 times worse.
This is OT but I'll ask it here because you guys seem to know a lot about cars.
What would be a good car for a/.er who doesn't know much about cars and isn't interested in racing, but likes tech stuff? Something with a lot of cool accessories and automation? Let's say you could spend a lot, $40 or $50K. Thanks!
When we were told to expect global warming, that was going to be bad. Crops would fail, diseases would spread, people would suffer. Now we are told to expect at least localized cooling, and that is going to be bad too. More crop failures, more suffering.
The lesson, clearly, is that "change is bad". Any change, either warmer or colder, will make things worse. If the sea level rises or falls, that will be disaster. Whether winter or summer becomes longer or shorter, it is harmful.
Apparently most analysts believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds! The only situation which would be acceptable to them is perfect stasis: no change, no novelty, nothing different from what it has been for centuries in the past.
Isn't this an awfully limiting philosophy? Should we always judge the future against the present, with the assumption that any change is automatically something to be avoided?
I wish that we could adopt a more dynamic perspective. It is guaranteed that the future will bring new changes and new challenges. Climate changes are going to be only the smallest part of what we are going to see in the next century. "Creative destruction" is an inherent part of the scientific and technological progress which has led to a world where people are living longer, healthier and more productive lives than ever before.
Let's try to think a little more flexibly and creatively as we look towards the future. Change is not necessarily bad. Any way you look at it, change is going to happen. We need to be prepared to accept and handle change, and not fear it as something which is always threatening and harmful.
Seems to me that computer speech recognition has gone mainstream in the last year or so. I'm talking about telephone services to confirm reservations or get information for airlines, rail travel etc. Almost all of these now work by voice around here. You say your flight number or departure city and the system retrieves the information.
They work pretty well in my experience, recognizing even long numbers. Probably helps that they are looking for matches in an internal database.
So I'd say this is one prediction which is finally starting to come true.
If I ever saw a problem that needed a technical, not, I repeat NOT a legal solution, this is it.
Why the hell sue people when you can easily stop them from "infringing" (or whatever they call it).
By the same token, you can keep people off your property by putting up a nine foot tall fence with razor wire on top and using guard dogs inside. Since this technical solution works, why bother with property rights?
The answer should be obvious. Given the technical reality that people have the ability to keep others out, it is simplest to recognize that reality with the legal system. Keeping the laws consistent with the real world will be cheaper and more efficient in the long run.
Since web sites have the ability, albeit with some difficulty, to keep users from deep linking, it makes most sense to give them the legal right to do so. This way the laws and the technical realities are consistent, and you don't end up with a wasteful technological arms race.
With an analog cable TV, an analog VCR can be used to record anything from it you want.
Not so with digital.
But if you convert the digital signal to analog (which is what the cable box does, for most digital cable subscribers), then you can still record it on your VCR. These restriction mechanisms only apply to digital recordings.
So you haven't lost anything. You can still do everything you can do now, make recordings, share them with your friends, watch them as often as you like. It's just that they have to be analog recordings, as has been the case for decades.
Why not use a useful computation rather than something useless like hash colissions?
First, SETI's not useful.
But if you DID find something useful, that would defeat the purpose of hashcash entirely! It would mean that there was effectively no cost to producing hashcash, since the creation of it had intrinsic value. So you would be in effect reimbursed for your effort in creating the hashcash, which would remove the cost factor that is supposed to be present.
Few people can grasp that there is nothing you can do to prevent hackers and virii from attacking your system.
Here is how I understand that Palladium is supposed to defend against viruses. This is based on a presentation I saw a couple of weeks ago by a Microsoft guy.
First, Palladium uses a crypto chip (what some critics call the Fritz chip) which can seal data. This way secure software can lock up data so that if some other software gets infected, the data is still safe. So the virus has to actually infect the secure software.
Second, when the crypto chip encrypts the data, it embeds a hash of the secure application in the data blob. When a piece of software decrypts it, the crypto chip computes a hash of the decrypting software, and compares it with the hash embedded in the encrypted data. If they disagree, it does not allow the data to be decrypted.
Therefore, if a virus infects a piece of software that has encrypted some secure data, it won't be able to decrypt it any more. The virus has changed the executable code and so the hash will change. This will be detected by the crypto chip and so it won't allow the decryption to go forward.
Anyway, that's the theory. Infected software other than a secure module can't get at the secure module's sealed data; and infecting the secure module will change its hash, so already-sealed data will no longer be accessible.
There's also a feature where the crypto chip can report the hash of some secure software to a remote server on the net. This could let distributed applications detect if a remote system was infected with a virus.
It's about control and competition. They aren't scared of copying, they're scared of people making their own stuff and not paying the industry taxes to get it made and distributed.
If that were true, then why would the motion picture studios in Hollywood be leading the charge? Big Hollywood productions face no serious competition from people being able to make and distribute their own movies. Low-budget, small scale productions are a completely different art form than the big studio pictures.
It seems more likely that Hollywood's concern is that if people can see movies for free, they won't pay to see movies. You don't need to look any deeper than that for an explanation of their actions.
I wonder if some of the "anti-first" votes may be due to misunderstanding. The question is asked in the negative form which is always confusing. By "agreeing" you are saying that the First goes too far. But maybe some people got confused and thought they were "agreeing" with the First Amendment.
After all, look at it like this. According to this poll, almost 50% of Americans believe that the First Amendment goes too far. If so we ought to be able to find someone here who agrees with this. Granted/. is not a representative community, but if truly 50% of Americans say that it goes too far, we ought to be able to find a substantial number of slashdot readers who agree.
I'm not familiar with this problem, so what I'm going to say is probably well known to students in the field.
It seems like the best way to produce a palindrome on the next step is for the sum of the kth digit and the kth-from-the-end digit to be less than 10. Then there will be no carries and we get a nice palindrome.
For random numbers, the chance of this being true is 1/2 for each digit in the first half of the number. Therefore with a number of length 2n digits, the chance that it will be palindromic on the next step is 1 in 2^n. (That' s one in two-to-the-nth power.)
If a number is not a palindrome on one step, it will become about one digit longer from the reverse-and-add. So at each step that it is not palindromic, the chance that it ever will become palindromic decreases.
From this perspective, it's not surprising that most small numbers become palindromes after a few steps, but that as we get to larger numbers we will find more and more that seem to never become palindromic. After some length the chance of ever again getting a palindrome is so remote that there is no point in continuing - your computer is more likely to make a mistake than for the number to happen to have the special form that can create a palindrome.
196 just happens to be a number which "gets lucky", it escapes out of the small-number region where most form palindromes. Once you get past a dozen or so steps you'll probably never get a palindrome.
There doesn't have to be anything special about 196, it's all a matter of chance and odds.
Based on my corpus, "sex" indicates a.97 probability of the containing email being a spam, whereas "sexy" indicates.99 probability. And Bayes' Rule, equally unambiguous, says that an email containing both words would, in the (unlikely) absence of any other evidence, have a 99.97% chance of being a spam.
This reasoning is statistically invalid. It is only true if the chance of the word "sexy" appearing in a message is independent of the chance of the word "sex" appearing. In other words, only if knowing that the word "sex" appears tells you nothing about how likely the word "sexy" is to appear, can you reason as he is doing above.
That's probably a very poor assumption in this case.
He is doing:
p(sex & sexy) = p(sex) * p(sexy)
The correct formula is:
p(sex & sexy) = p(sex) * p(sexy | sex)
where the last term means the probably of "sexy" given that "sex" appears.
Maybe his approach is good enough for his purposes, but the statistical foundations are not correct.
The article does a good job of analyzing which roll to choose, but neglects the most important question of installing toilet paper rolls.
Should the paper come over the top of the roll, or out from under the bottom?
Clearly, over the top is better, because no matter how long or short the loose end is, it is always on the front so you can find it. With the under the bottom system, the loose end can be hanging behind the roll and you have to roll it until you can grab it.
Courts don't usually like cases like these, because they are entirely hypothetical:
We plan to do X, and we're afraid that we will be sued and/or prosecuted under laws Y. Can you please tell us whether or not X will be legal?
The problem is, you can come up with any number of possible X and Y's of this form and ask a court for an opinion. Courts would be swamped if they had to rule on every possibility like this. Courts prefer to deal with actual disputes, not hypothetical ones. They may throw this whole thing out on that basis.
In this particular case, while Edelman *plans* to pursue this research, don't forget that he's entering Harvard Law School in a couple of months. From what I've heard, that's a pretty challenging program. He may not have that much time on his hands to pursue his hobby of saving the world. So until he actually engages in the activity, it is all hypothetical.
Further, while the suit envisions various responses that N2H2 and/or the government might bring, based on the DMCA and the license agreement, these are again entirely hypothetical. If the court does rule on these matters, nothing would prevent N2H2 from proceeding on other grounds not anticipated by the ACLU. So the court would be faced with the same lawsuit twice, and its efforts to rule on the hypothetical case would turn out to have been a waste of time.
In the end, ruling on hypothetical actions and hypothetical responses usually involves too much uncertainty to make the effort worth the court's time. Sometimes they will do it if it is a sufficiently important case, but more often they'll say, come back when there is an actual dispute with facts on the table. That's basically what happened with the Felten case, and chances are the same thing will happen here.
The Palermo scale, on which this object has a value of 0.06, is described at JPL. According to the accompanying paper, it is intended for the use of professional astronomers and is not intended for communicating risks to the general public. A different scale, the Torino scale, which has integer values from 0 to 10, is intended for that purpose. This object is probably a Torino 2.
A Palermo value of 0.06 means that the risk from this object is elevated above the background risk for such objects by about 15%. (The 0.06 is the log of the ratio of the risk to the background risk.) So however worried you were yesterday about collisions with 2 km asteroids, you can be 15% more worried today.
Everyone agrees that artists should be rewarded for their good work. The dissent centers around whether copyright is any longer the best way to provide that reward.
If you have DRM you don't need copyright. DRM is a replacement for copyright. Where copyright relies on laws, DRM relies on technology.
Arguing against copyright is no way to oppose DRM; if anything, saying that copyright is bad may be interpreted to mean that DRM is good.
Given that technology can prevent deep linking, it is most efficient if the law is in accordance with that technological reality. A law which is inconsistent with the real world is a recipe for expensive inefficiency. We may not like restrictions on deep linking, but given that this is how the technology works, it is best if the law works the same way.
An analogy might be land property rights. You can build a brick wall around your property to keep people out; this is the technological reality. But the law recognizes this and allows you to put up a No Trespassing sign with the same effect. Ultimately the reason we respect No Trespassing signs is because we know that the property owner could put up a wall if he really had to. But building a wall would be an inefficient waste of resources when he can achieve the same effect with just a sign.
This example demonstrates how keeping the law consistent with reality improves efficiency, and the same thing would be true for deep linking.
Robert Hettinga's review described the new techniques as a solution to "David Brin's world of ubiquitous surveillance". Someone forwarded the review to Brin and he went ballistic!
Read his response here. The last thing David Brin wants to see is "translucent databases". He wants more openness and transparency, not less.
Slashdot Mirror
So if we had a DRM system, something like Palladium, you could download that movie, then if your file got corrupted or accidentally deleted, the system could be designed so that you could download it again. You'd only have to pay for it once. That's how some of the music download services work.
The DRM controls would prevent you from making copies of the movie for other people, so the studio's rights would be protected, while you could be protected against problems like you describe.
Does this mean you would endorse a DRM system like Palladium?
If advanced alien civilizations existed in numbers significant enough for us to hear their radio transmissions, the probability is overwhelming that at least one in a nearby galaxy would have embarked on a program of colonization. Evolution favors organisms which have a drive to expand (otherwise they would have been out-competed). Technological civilizations inherit their evolutionary drives and will share this expansionist tendency.
Expansion can be performed at a significant fraction of the speed of light. von Neumann machines - self-replicating, nanotech-based robotic spacecraft - can fly to a new system, make copies for exploration and colonization, and more copies which get sent off to other stars, all using local system resources. An entire galaxy or even group of galaxies can be explored and colonized at perhaps a tenth the speed of light. A million years will be enough to cover all the stars in a galaxy; a few times that will cover the local group of galaxies.
Once a solar system is inhabited by a technological civilization, its most important goal will be to manage the primary resource, the energy production of the central star. Stars in unmodified systems radiate 99+% of their energy wastefully into empty space. A civilization will want to capture that energy and put it to work, by building a Dyson sphere or some similar structures to collect the wasted light and heat from the star. Star systems inhabited by advanced civilizations will look very different from the ones we see in our galaxy.
The galaxy is ten billion years old. Our technological culture is no more than a few thousand years old. If other technological species have arisen, chances are statistically overwhelming that they are at least tens or hundreds of millions of years ahead of us. This means that they will have had ample time to fully explore, colonize and even modify the entire galaxy.
The only plausible way this can't happen is if there are no other technological civilizations out there. And in that case, SETI won't work, we won't find any signals. That's the only reasonable conclusion we can draw from the fact that we live in a galaxy unmodified by technology.
If the galaxy were so full of advanced life that SETI would work, they'd be here, and everywhere else in the galaxy, by now. Therefore SETI can't work.
Now how do you get from this to Barbie? She's not making copyrighted works audible, other than her own recorded voice!
And why has no one pointed out that the bill fails to say anything about what the security standards are required to do?
If you wear contact lenses, you're already used to touching your eyeballs and having stuff put on there, so the equipment is no big deal. I had it done too, a couple of years ago, and the procedure was nothing. Getting a filling at the dentist's is 10 times worse.
This is OT but I'll ask it here because you guys seem to know a lot about cars.
/.er who doesn't know much about cars and isn't interested in racing, but likes tech stuff? Something with a lot of cool accessories and automation? Let's say you could spend a lot, $40 or $50K. Thanks!
What would be a good car for a
When we were told to expect global warming, that was going to be bad. Crops would fail, diseases would spread, people would suffer. Now we are told to expect at least localized cooling, and that is going to be bad too. More crop failures, more suffering.
The lesson, clearly, is that "change is bad". Any change, either warmer or colder, will make things worse. If the sea level rises or falls, that will be disaster. Whether winter or summer becomes longer or shorter, it is harmful.
Apparently most analysts believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds! The only situation which would be acceptable to them is perfect stasis: no change, no novelty, nothing different from what it has been for centuries in the past.
Isn't this an awfully limiting philosophy? Should we always judge the future against the present, with the assumption that any change is automatically something to be avoided?
I wish that we could adopt a more dynamic perspective. It is guaranteed that the future will bring new changes and new challenges. Climate changes are going to be only the smallest part of what we are going to see in the next century. "Creative destruction" is an inherent part of the scientific and technological progress which has led to a world where people are living longer, healthier and more productive lives than ever before.
Let's try to think a little more flexibly and creatively as we look towards the future. Change is not necessarily bad. Any way you look at it, change is going to happen. We need to be prepared to accept and handle change, and not fear it as something which is always threatening and harmful.
Seems to me that computer speech recognition has gone mainstream in the last year or so. I'm talking about telephone services to confirm reservations or get information for airlines, rail travel etc. Almost all of these now work by voice around here. You say your flight number or departure city and the system retrieves the information.
They work pretty well in my experience, recognizing even long numbers. Probably helps that they are looking for matches in an internal database.
So I'd say this is one prediction which is finally starting to come true.
The answer should be obvious. Given the technical reality that people have the ability to keep others out, it is simplest to recognize that reality with the legal system. Keeping the laws consistent with the real world will be cheaper and more efficient in the long run.
Since web sites have the ability, albeit with some difficulty, to keep users from deep linking, it makes most sense to give them the legal right to do so. This way the laws and the technical realities are consistent, and you don't end up with a wasteful technological arms race.
Not so with digital.
But if you convert the digital signal to analog (which is what the cable box does, for most digital cable subscribers), then you can still record it on your VCR. These restriction mechanisms only apply to digital recordings.
So you haven't lost anything. You can still do everything you can do now, make recordings, share them with your friends, watch them as often as you like. It's just that they have to be analog recordings, as has been the case for decades.
First, SETI's not useful.
But if you DID find something useful, that would defeat the purpose of hashcash entirely! It would mean that there was effectively no cost to producing hashcash, since the creation of it had intrinsic value. So you would be in effect reimbursed for your effort in creating the hashcash, which would remove the cost factor that is supposed to be present.
Here is how I understand that Palladium is supposed to defend against viruses. This is based on a presentation I saw a couple of weeks ago by a Microsoft guy.
First, Palladium uses a crypto chip (what some critics call the Fritz chip) which can seal data. This way secure software can lock up data so that if some other software gets infected, the data is still safe. So the virus has to actually infect the secure software.
Second, when the crypto chip encrypts the data, it embeds a hash of the secure application in the data blob. When a piece of software decrypts it, the crypto chip computes a hash of the decrypting software, and compares it with the hash embedded in the encrypted data. If they disagree, it does not allow the data to be decrypted.
Therefore, if a virus infects a piece of software that has encrypted some secure data, it won't be able to decrypt it any more. The virus has changed the executable code and so the hash will change. This will be detected by the crypto chip and so it won't allow the decryption to go forward.
Anyway, that's the theory. Infected software other than a secure module can't get at the secure module's sealed data; and infecting the secure module will change its hash, so already-sealed data will no longer be accessible.
There's also a feature where the crypto chip can report the hash of some secure software to a remote server on the net. This could let distributed applications detect if a remote system was infected with a virus.
If that were true, then why would the motion picture studios in Hollywood be leading the charge? Big Hollywood productions face no serious competition from people being able to make and distribute their own movies. Low-budget, small scale productions are a completely different art form than the big studio pictures.
It seems more likely that Hollywood's concern is that if people can see movies for free, they won't pay to see movies. You don't need to look any deeper than that for an explanation of their actions.
I wonder if some of the "anti-first" votes may be due to misunderstanding. The question is asked in the negative form which is always confusing. By "agreeing" you are saying that the First goes too far. But maybe some people got confused and thought they were "agreeing" with the First Amendment.
/. is not a representative community, but if truly 50% of Americans say that it goes too far, we ought to be able to find a substantial number of slashdot readers who agree.
After all, look at it like this. According to this poll, almost 50% of Americans believe that the First Amendment goes too far. If so we ought to be able to find someone here who agrees with this. Granted
Where are they?
I'm not familiar with this problem, so what I'm going to say is probably well known to students in the field.
It seems like the best way to produce a palindrome on the next step is for the sum of the kth digit and the kth-from-the-end digit to be less than 10. Then there will be no carries and we get a nice palindrome.
For random numbers, the chance of this being true is 1/2 for each digit in the first half of the number. Therefore with a number of length 2n digits, the chance that it will be palindromic on the next step is 1 in 2^n. (That' s one in two-to-the-nth power.)
If a number is not a palindrome on one step, it will become about one digit longer from the reverse-and-add. So at each step that it is not palindromic, the chance that it ever will become palindromic decreases.
From this perspective, it's not surprising that most small numbers become palindromes after a few steps, but that as we get to larger numbers we will find more and more that seem to never become palindromic. After some length the chance of ever again getting a palindrome is so remote that there is no point in continuing - your computer is more likely to make a mistake than for the number to happen to have the special form that can create a palindrome.
196 just happens to be a number which "gets lucky", it escapes out of the small-number region where most form palindromes. Once you get past a dozen or so steps you'll probably never get a palindrome.
There doesn't have to be anything special about 196, it's all a matter of chance and odds.
That's how I see it, anyway.
This reasoning is statistically invalid. It is only true if the chance of the word "sexy" appearing in a message is independent of the chance of the word "sex" appearing. In other words, only if knowing that the word "sex" appears tells you nothing about how likely the word "sexy" is to appear, can you reason as he is doing above. That's probably a very poor assumption in this case.
He is doing:
The correct formula is: where the last term means the probably of "sexy" given that "sex" appears.Maybe his approach is good enough for his purposes, but the statistical foundations are not correct.
The article does a good job of analyzing which roll to choose, but neglects the most important question of installing toilet paper rolls.
Should the paper come over the top of the roll, or out from under the bottom?
Clearly, over the top is better, because no matter how long or short the loose end is, it is always on the front so you can find it. With the under the bottom system, the loose end can be hanging behind the roll and you have to roll it until you can grab it.
Courts don't usually like cases like these, because they are entirely hypothetical:
We plan to do X, and we're afraid that we will be sued and/or prosecuted under laws Y. Can you please tell us whether or not X will be legal?
The problem is, you can come up with any number of possible X and Y's of this form and ask a court for an opinion. Courts would be swamped if they had to rule on every possibility like this. Courts prefer to deal with actual disputes, not hypothetical ones. They may throw this whole thing out on that basis.
In this particular case, while Edelman *plans* to pursue this research, don't forget that he's entering Harvard Law School in a couple of months. From what I've heard, that's a pretty challenging program. He may not have that much time on his hands to pursue his hobby of saving the world. So until he actually engages in the activity, it is all hypothetical.
Further, while the suit envisions various responses that N2H2 and/or the government might bring, based on the DMCA and the license agreement, these are again entirely hypothetical. If the court does rule on these matters, nothing would prevent N2H2 from proceeding on other grounds not anticipated by the ACLU. So the court would be faced with the same lawsuit twice, and its efforts to rule on the hypothetical case would turn out to have been a waste of time.
In the end, ruling on hypothetical actions and hypothetical responses usually involves too much uncertainty to make the effort worth the court's time. Sometimes they will do it if it is a sufficiently important case, but more often they'll say, come back when there is an actual dispute with facts on the table. That's basically what happened with the Felten case, and chances are the same thing will happen here.
A Palermo value of 0.06 means that the risk from this object is elevated above the background risk for such objects by about 15%. (The 0.06 is the log of the ratio of the risk to the background risk.) So however worried you were yesterday about collisions with 2 km asteroids, you can be 15% more worried today.
In short, not worth losing sleep over.
According to this link that was given earlier, the patent was filed on October 27, 1986, so it will expire on that date in 2006, not 2004.
A great resource for finding donors is www.opensecrets.org. You can find out who gave the most money to Sen. Hollings over the past 5 years (surprise - Disney is 16th!), or which members of Congress received the most from the tv/movies/music industries (Howard Berman, D-CA is number one), and lots of other goodies like this. It's an amazing collection of information.
If you have DRM you don't need copyright. DRM is a replacement for copyright. Where copyright relies on laws, DRM relies on technology.
Arguing against copyright is no way to oppose DRM; if anything, saying that copyright is bad may be interpreted to mean that DRM is good.
Given that technology can prevent deep linking, it is most efficient if the law is in accordance with that technological reality. A law which is inconsistent with the real world is a recipe for expensive inefficiency. We may not like restrictions on deep linking, but given that this is how the technology works, it is best if the law works the same way.
An analogy might be land property rights. You can build a brick wall around your property to keep people out; this is the technological reality. But the law recognizes this and allows you to put up a No Trespassing sign with the same effect. Ultimately the reason we respect No Trespassing signs is because we know that the property owner could put up a wall if he really had to. But building a wall would be an inefficient waste of resources when he can achieve the same effect with just a sign.
This example demonstrates how keeping the law consistent with reality improves efficiency, and the same thing would be true for deep linking.
Don't forget, his eyeballs were Asian too.
Read his response here. The last thing David Brin wants to see is "translucent databases". He wants more openness and transparency, not less.