Since these things are lasting so long, I wonder how much less it would cost to mass produce these rovers... maybe cover the moon (i know moondust is harsh) with them or something. I bet a dozen of these on things on the moon could give us some economic payback within our lifetimes.
Yeah this is fun now. Just wait until they get all of this stuff under one legal umbrella that seemingly doesn't make any sense, and then they start regulating the umbrella.:P
No one will notice while the legislation is passing through congress because it's labeled "The Family and Decency Protection Act" and the bill only refers to "Visicom" systems, which in another bill (which was attached to a military spending bill) defined Visicom systems as pretty much anything dealing with art.
I don't think it would work (blogs are nasty for politicians), but you know they'd try if they wanted to regular art badly:)
Seriously though, I think this will get shot down in the courts, just like the ban in Indianapolis was.
while it's gonna be cool to have all the old Nintendo console emulators, I just bought my wife a super nintendo and a bunch of square RPGS! So much for retaining value:D
The size of the US military I would think will affect the toppling of this pyramid in the 21st century... right or wrong, this puts that noose you mentioned around all of us.
As a guy who can't remember phone numbers except by patterns (dyslexia, but I guess I'm stupid), has been treated successfully for carpel tunnel (I guess I wasn't taking breaks correctly), and whose mind wanders quickly from topic to topic and feel like it's being driven by some kind of engine that forces me to go along for the ride (must not be ADD, must be my natural involuntary curiousity), I kinda gotta think this guy is being sarcastic.
Sure wish he'd post his name so we could find out *shrug*
perhaps the programming team that selected the name thinks this project bares some similarities to that mountain top. a rough climb that might kill them.
at a microsoft roadshow, the guy said their codename scheme is based off of ski-slopes near seattle... so this isn't far off.
While it's true that there are ways around DRM, such as going analog, that's not really its purpose. DRM is more like putting up a shed around some pile of crap you don't want someone to take, say some lumber. It's a different legal ballgame for someone to break-in to steal a 2x4 than if there the lumber was laying in your front yard. The DMCA made this legal distinction for electronic files in 1998.
Now if you want to talk about lobbying on copyright legislation, I'm on your side. Disney is such an ironic company: they push for legislation to increase the copyrights to claim to stories they originally took from works in the public domain.
I think the current copyright setup in the US does not encourage creativity, as it was designed to do. I would like to see it changed back to something more like 14 years from commercial release, whereafter the work is public domain and made freely available from the library of congress. And I don't see why files that are DRM'd shouldn't be legally required to have a way to unlock the files using the license servers record of private keys.
But I'd rather see changes to the patent and copyright systems than force venders to not use DRM. No one is required to sell or buy DRM restricted products, and not every media site uses extremely restrictive license rules, it's entirely up to the merchant on what rights are provided (hence why they like it). Most non-subscription music sites allow their users to burn CD of purchased music. They're not dummies, they know you're going to burn a CD, rip it to mp3s and upload it to your iPod.
It's been really interesting lately watching these old-media companies adapt their ways to the new frontiers. At any rate, I'm sure what comes out won't be worse than the days before computers powerful enough to run an mp3 at higher than 8-bit mono and we had to buy our music in the malls for $17 at price fixing record stores.
right right right DRM is physically impossible in a perfect computing universe where all information is given to everybody, but that's never been the case i n the real world, hence why it's working in the real world now.
If you want to buy music from a company that will pay you in credits for the bandwidth you provide from your P2P node, check out http://www.peerimpact.com/, you should be able to signup for the beta.
> How much less could music cost if the money > wasted was instead passed back to the consumers?
The distribution costs for a CD (not counting shelf-time/space costs) is about 15 cents + shipping. So that P2P solution just made your album cost $16.75 instead of $17.00. Prices are set to what they are now, they're set to what they are because people are willing to pay that price. If you don't like the price of the latest Britney Spears, support a local band!
I'm not sure what lobbying you're concerned with, but the only legislation that really has made DRM possible is the DMCA, which make it a felony to disable DRM.
If you're not happy with DRM, don't buy DRM'd content. If you're not happy with Walmart, don't shop at Walmart.
I agree that intentionally sharing copyrighted materials for the purposes of committing piracy should be illegal and punished. The spirit of this law is fine with me.
However after reading the text of the legislation, I'm a little concerned about the meaning of "shared folders" and "copyrighted material". Like others have pointed out, Microsoft provides the shared folder C$, which essentially means your entire computer is a shared folder.
Also, on my MediaCenter PC, all of my recorded tv programs go into the Shared Documents/Recorded TV folder, and I can access those files from any other computer on my network, and those files are definitely copyrighted works, and they're definitely shared, but I'm not sharing them outside of my LAN, I'm sharing them with myself for convenience.
What if I accidentally turn off the firewall on my router and someone can see my shared documents folder. Am I a felon? The letter of this law makes it seem that I would be charged with piracy in the 1st degree, where as a better charge for that would be 3rd degree piracy if I should have known that my firewall was comprimised.
I don't know that my grandmother can appropriately administrate a firewall up to the level required by law here.
I'm with you 110% on the text size issue... same problem in java applets.
Personally, I never use Flash as the entire site. I make critical user interface components in flash that interact with the rest of the site with javascript. I wish others did the same... site intros are just rediculous these days.
And I don't think we really have divergent opinions on the self-paced vs author-paced design. Suggesting that author-paced design is the way to go sounds like breaking rule #1 of user-interface design... it's never the user's fault, even if it is.
This may lead to a competiting platform for SVG development, as far as web navigation goes, which could allow for fast downloads and more end-user control of format.
I agree with you that flash loads too slow for general site navigation on the slower broadband connections, and most people aren't using flash to its potential, but I'll have to disagree with you that having the content producer controlling the layout of a site is a bad thing... it's just more crap the designer has to deal with in order to make a truly usable site, and most designers out there seem to not be up to the job.
I've been developing for MCE2005 lately at work, and being able to have control of the layout really helps provide a better user environment. In my view, users should be able to just enjoy the experience as easily as television but that experience should be enhanced by the two-way communications provided by the Internet. However my opinion on this may be a little skewed from the rest of slashdot after developing websites meant for television for several months.
and a damn good consumer application at that. I'd never really used it much until trying out this remix, and I'm impressed with how easy it is to use, but definitely consumer.
I don't know that apple needs to release garageband for windows anyway, I was very happy using the Sonic Foundry (now Sony) audio suite on PC, and the rest of my favorite software like Reason and Reaktor were PC ports of mac versions anyway.
I switched (unintentionally) to mac after I found a bargain on a G4 tower and started using it... these things don't crash. I've lost so much work in my lifetime due to PC crashes. When I'm writing music, I don't want to have to worry about keeping the platform going, just like your fedEx guy doesn't want to worry about his truck.
What are they gonna sue you for? The increase in salary you received for disclosing that you have the knowledge to complete the project at hand?
I have never heard of a case where criminal prosecution was pursued on someone who shared a code sample for a job interview... nor for any other situation that didn't involve using that information for direct financial gains. If you know where we can find examples of this, I would be grateful, as I'm likely to be ignorant of these cases since IANAL.
I agree that violating an NDA isn't the best way to go, but I don't agree that you'll ever commit a violation of NDA that would cause you to become such a celebrity that no one would hire you again.... programmers have the profile of a construction worker, not a rockstar. The legal consequences seem to me to be similar to smoking meth (not talking health risks here) in a trailer park.
While in school for electrical engineering the professors covered the issues of patents, and what they taught was to do what you're going to do and don't worry about the lawsuits.
The only risk point I see here is the new employer finding out that you violated an NDA. Most employer NDA's are enforced with termination, which has already happened to you.
with that kind of logic, we should just go ahead an decimate the entire population of North Korea, since their leader has questionable mental faculties.
I think I lot of people on this board haven't tried out IPTV to see its potential. I agree with this article that there isn't a lot of content out there (cable's merger with content producers is the main problem), but you guys have got to go give this a try. Who needs a PVR?
Go into your local computer store, find a MediaCenter PC, and go to the Online Spotlight and just check out Reuters or something. This is pretty cool stuff.
Oh yeah, and stop with the tin-foil hats on statistics... no one is watching you specifically. Nobody cares what you are doing individually.
We gotta be pragmatic about this because it's only what happens in the real world that really matters.
There are two ways the content companies are going to go with: either you deal with DRM'd content or they'll go to every step possible to make sure their content can't get on your computer without violating the DMCA.
All the rest of the arguments are academic discourses on civil liberties. Unfortunately, the record labels have the civil liberty to not release their creative works digitally.
Great point on copyright. I'm not sure what the copyright duration on creative works is at the moment, but life + 99 years comes to mind. I hope I'm wrong on that, I'd rather see something more like 14 years and then the works are put into the public domain and available from the library of congress. I think that would be a fair compromise for society and copyright owners.
I wouldn't mind seeing regulation that requires the content owners or DRM license providers maintain the keys for all of the content encrypted and placed for sale. Working for a DRM provider, I know this is already done since we need to keys to be able to generate licenses for content. Maybe these keys should be registered with the gov't or some authorized third party company.
I have yet to see where any of the entities involved with trusted computing want to password protect everything... they seem to want to give users the option to protect their own data, and allow content providers to protect their files.
I doubt a local Mom and Pop grocery store would want to use these features, so I doubt they will ever be required to. Microsoft does not want to be known as the company that loses everyone's vital business data.
Most of the major content producers I have talked to about DRM services want to get their content out there to customers for reasonable prices and fair levels of control, the problem is that these major studios are for the most part middlemen.
The reason they require DRM for their online services is the spaghetti of contracts the entertainment industry has built up for themselves of the past several decades. For example if one studio released an album online unprotected, and the artists who created the content can demonstrate that piracy caused a loss in revinue, the content provider can be held legally liable for that loss.
As long as these studios took reasonable steps to prevent this piracy from occuring, their collective asses are covered, even if the DRM scheme used is cracked down the road.
Slashdot Mirror
Since these things are lasting so long, I wonder how much less it would cost to mass produce these rovers... maybe cover the moon (i know moondust is harsh) with them or something. I bet a dozen of these on things on the moon could give us some economic payback within our lifetimes.
Yeah this is fun now. Just wait until they get all of this stuff under one legal umbrella that seemingly doesn't make any sense, and then they start regulating the umbrella. :P
:)
No one will notice while the legislation is passing through congress because it's labeled "The Family and Decency Protection Act" and the bill only refers to "Visicom" systems, which in another bill (which was attached to a military spending bill) defined Visicom systems as pretty much anything dealing with art.
I don't think it would work (blogs are nasty for politicians), but you know they'd try if they wanted to regular art badly
Seriously though, I think this will get shot down in the courts, just like the ban in Indianapolis was.
while it's gonna be cool to have all the old Nintendo console emulators, I just bought my wife a super nintendo and a bunch of square RPGS! So much for retaining value :D
The size of the US military I would think will affect the toppling of this pyramid in the 21st century... right or wrong, this puts that noose you mentioned around all of us.
As a guy who can't remember phone numbers except by patterns (dyslexia, but I guess I'm stupid), has been treated successfully for carpel tunnel (I guess I wasn't taking breaks correctly), and whose mind wanders quickly from topic to topic and feel like it's being driven by some kind of engine that forces me to go along for the ride (must not be ADD, must be my natural involuntary curiousity), I kinda gotta think this guy is being sarcastic.
Sure wish he'd post his name so we could find out *shrug*
perhaps the programming team that selected the name thinks this project bares some similarities to that mountain top. a rough climb that might kill them.
at a microsoft roadshow, the guy said their codename scheme is based off of ski-slopes near seattle... so this isn't far off.
While it's true that there are ways around DRM, such as going analog, that's not really its purpose. DRM is more like putting up a shed around some pile of crap you don't want someone to take, say some lumber. It's a different legal ballgame for someone to break-in to steal a 2x4 than if there the lumber was laying in your front yard. The DMCA made this legal distinction for electronic files in 1998.
Now if you want to talk about lobbying on copyright legislation, I'm on your side. Disney is such an ironic company: they push for legislation to increase the copyrights to claim to stories they originally took from works in the public domain.
I think the current copyright setup in the US does not encourage creativity, as it was designed to do. I would like to see it changed back to something more like 14 years from commercial release, whereafter the work is public domain and made freely available from the library of congress. And I don't see why files that are DRM'd shouldn't be legally required to have a way to unlock the files using the license servers record of private keys.
But I'd rather see changes to the patent and copyright systems than force venders to not use DRM. No one is required to sell or buy DRM restricted products, and not every media site uses extremely restrictive license rules, it's entirely up to the merchant on what rights are provided (hence why they like it). Most non-subscription music sites allow their users to burn CD of purchased music. They're not dummies, they know you're going to burn a CD, rip it to mp3s and upload it to your iPod.
It's been really interesting lately watching these old-media companies adapt their ways to the new frontiers. At any rate, I'm sure what comes out won't be worse than the days before computers powerful enough to run an mp3 at higher than 8-bit mono and we had to buy our music in the malls for $17 at price fixing record stores.
Next time I see a green light I'm gonna shut off the engine in my car and turn it back on again :)
right right right DRM is physically impossible in a perfect computing universe where all information is given to everybody, but that's never been the case i n the real world, hence why it's working in the real world now.
If you want to buy music from a company that will pay you in credits for the bandwidth you provide from your P2P node, check out http://www.peerimpact.com/, you should be able to signup for the beta.
> How much less could music cost if the money > wasted was instead passed back to the consumers?
The distribution costs for a CD (not counting shelf-time/space costs) is about 15 cents + shipping. So that P2P solution just made your album cost $16.75 instead of $17.00. Prices are set to what they are now, they're set to what they are because people are willing to pay that price. If you don't like the price of the latest Britney Spears, support a local band!
I'm not sure what lobbying you're concerned with, but the only legislation that really has made DRM possible is the DMCA, which make it a felony to disable DRM.
If you're not happy with DRM, don't buy DRM'd content. If you're not happy with Walmart, don't shop at Walmart.
I agree that intentionally sharing copyrighted materials for the purposes of committing piracy should be illegal and punished. The spirit of this law is fine with me.
However after reading the text of the legislation, I'm a little concerned about the meaning of "shared folders" and "copyrighted material". Like others have pointed out, Microsoft provides the shared folder C$, which essentially means your entire computer is a shared folder.
Also, on my MediaCenter PC, all of my recorded tv programs go into the Shared Documents/Recorded TV folder, and I can access those files from any other computer on my network, and those files are definitely copyrighted works, and they're definitely shared, but I'm not sharing them outside of my LAN, I'm sharing them with myself for convenience.
What if I accidentally turn off the firewall on my router and someone can see my shared documents folder. Am I a felon? The letter of this law makes it seem that I would be charged with piracy in the 1st degree, where as a better charge for that would be 3rd degree piracy if I should have known that my firewall was comprimised.
I don't know that my grandmother can appropriately administrate a firewall up to the level required by law here.
I'm with you 110% on the text size issue... same problem in java applets.
Personally, I never use Flash as the entire site. I make critical user interface components in flash that interact with the rest of the site with javascript. I wish others did the same... site intros are just rediculous these days.
And I don't think we really have divergent opinions on the self-paced vs author-paced design. Suggesting that author-paced design is the way to go sounds like breaking rule #1 of user-interface design... it's never the user's fault, even if it is.
This may lead to a competiting platform for SVG development, as far as web navigation goes, which could allow for fast downloads and more end-user control of format.
I agree with you that flash loads too slow for general site navigation on the slower broadband connections, and most people aren't using flash to its potential, but I'll have to disagree with you that having the content producer controlling the layout of a site is a bad thing... it's just more crap the designer has to deal with in order to make a truly usable site, and most designers out there seem to not be up to the job.
I've been developing for MCE2005 lately at work, and being able to have control of the layout really helps provide a better user environment. In my view, users should be able to just enjoy the experience as easily as television but that experience should be enhanced by the two-way communications provided by the Internet. However my opinion on this may be a little skewed from the rest of slashdot after developing websites meant for television for several months.
and a damn good consumer application at that. I'd never really used it much until trying out this remix, and I'm impressed with how easy it is to use, but definitely consumer.
yeah, I pulled that out of my ass... sorry if my analogy skills aren't up to par on a Saturday morning :)
I don't know that apple needs to release garageband for windows anyway, I was very happy using the Sonic Foundry (now Sony) audio suite on PC, and the rest of my favorite software like Reason and Reaktor were PC ports of mac versions anyway.
I switched (unintentionally) to mac after I found a bargain on a G4 tower and started using it... these things don't crash. I've lost so much work in my lifetime due to PC crashes. When I'm writing music, I don't want to have to worry about keeping the platform going, just like your fedEx guy doesn't want to worry about his truck.
With projects like Peer Impact currently in beta (record industry approved P2P merchant system), does the RIAA still maintain it's anti-P2P stance?
What are they gonna sue you for? The increase in salary you received for disclosing that you have the knowledge to complete the project at hand?
I have never heard of a case where criminal prosecution was pursued on someone who shared a code sample for a job interview... nor for any other situation that didn't involve using that information for direct financial gains. If you know where we can find examples of this, I would be grateful, as I'm likely to be ignorant of these cases since IANAL.
I agree that violating an NDA isn't the best way to go, but I don't agree that you'll ever commit a violation of NDA that would cause you to become such a celebrity that no one would hire you again.... programmers have the profile of a construction worker, not a rockstar. The legal consequences seem to me to be similar to smoking meth (not talking health risks here) in a trailer park.
While in school for electrical engineering the professors covered the issues of patents, and what they taught was to do what you're going to do and don't worry about the lawsuits.
The only risk point I see here is the new employer finding out that you violated an NDA. Most employer NDA's are enforced with termination, which has already happened to you.
with that kind of logic, we should just go ahead an decimate the entire population of North Korea, since their leader has questionable mental faculties.
yeah, I couldn't believe it. I didn't know so many people are biggoted against Americans these days.
It's like they think we only eat McDonalds and drive Escalades or something... I don't even know anyway that owns an Escalade.
I think I lot of people on this board haven't tried out IPTV to see its potential. I agree with this article that there isn't a lot of content out there (cable's merger with content producers is the main problem), but you guys have got to go give this a try. Who needs a PVR?
Go into your local computer store, find a MediaCenter PC, and go to the Online Spotlight and just check out Reuters or something. This is pretty cool stuff.
Oh yeah, and stop with the tin-foil hats on statistics... no one is watching you specifically. Nobody cares what you are doing individually.
We gotta be pragmatic about this because it's only what happens in the real world that really matters.
There are two ways the content companies are going to go with: either you deal with DRM'd content or they'll go to every step possible to make sure their content can't get on your computer without violating the DMCA.
All the rest of the arguments are academic discourses on civil liberties. Unfortunately, the record labels have the civil liberty to not release their creative works digitally.
Great point on copyright. I'm not sure what the copyright duration on creative works is at the moment, but life + 99 years comes to mind. I hope I'm wrong on that, I'd rather see something more like 14 years and then the works are put into the public domain and available from the library of congress. I think that would be a fair compromise for society and copyright owners.
I wouldn't mind seeing regulation that requires the content owners or DRM license providers maintain the keys for all of the content encrypted and placed for sale. Working for a DRM provider, I know this is already done since we need to keys to be able to generate licenses for content. Maybe these keys should be registered with the gov't or some authorized third party company.
I have yet to see where any of the entities involved with trusted computing want to password protect everything... they seem to want to give users the option to protect their own data, and allow content providers to protect their files.
I doubt a local Mom and Pop grocery store would want to use these features, so I doubt they will ever be required to. Microsoft does not want to be known as the company that loses everyone's vital business data.
Most of the major content producers I have talked to about DRM services want to get their content out there to customers for reasonable prices and fair levels of control, the problem is that these major studios are for the most part middlemen.
The reason they require DRM for their online services is the spaghetti of contracts the entertainment industry has built up for themselves of the past several decades. For example if one studio released an album online unprotected, and the artists who created the content can demonstrate that piracy caused a loss in revinue, the content provider can be held legally liable for that loss.
As long as these studios took reasonable steps to prevent this piracy from occuring, their collective asses are covered, even if the DRM scheme used is cracked down the road.