Good points, but I'm sure it's possible to make a machine which fools the device into thinking a thief is really you. From how I understand iris recognition, it just looks at your eyes visually. If someone had your iris scan, what's to stop them from using a LCD display (or other device) in front of the scanner? Would contacts with your iris pattern printed on them work?
Once a thief has your iris data, how could you change it so the thief can't get to your bank account? You'd be screwed.
What if it was sent to their hosting service / ISP / upstream provider? From what I understand, most DMCA complaints are sent to the organization who runs the network (for practical reasons) instead of the person who is accused.
IANAL, but can't they charge the people at IDSA for perjury or fraud? I'm sure sending false DMCA complaints is against some law. Don't they have to write "under penalty of perjury" somewhere when they file a DMCA complaint??? At the very least, these guys should be able to sue IDSA for slander / libel.
Until the victims of false DMCA complaints do something, these companies will keep it up...
The poster's point was he can buy the parts and put the computer together himself. If you know how to buy parts and assemble a computer, "build your own" is a very cheap way to get a high quality system. It's not going to be a bargan basement Dell computer at all. You can get quality brand name parts for decent prices.
From what I've seen, Dell / Gateway / Compaq all are expensive (compared to BYO) and seem to cut corners somewhere (often using cheap parts). The only real added value to buying one of these systems is you get tech support, and you don't have to assemble the computer yourself. If you know what you're doing, you don't need either option.
Though for a pre-built brand name computer, Macs seem to be better and have comparable prices.
I see your point, but can't someone just take a CDR, burn their trojan horse programs on it, somehow produce a label with logos on the top to make it look like a legit CDROM, and pass it on to the victim? The hardest part would be making the label, which for someone with a lot of time on his hands (who else would do this?) would probably take at most a day to get it perfect.
User has to connect to internet to register (can't use our product w/o registration!)--company is sent CD's ID code (so they know which CD you have and not to allow reregistration), user's name (so they know who you are), address (for direct marketing), phone number (for telemarketing calls), email (for spam), ss# (for identity fraud), cc# (for credit card fraud), and all this info is also sent to the feds for their TIA program.;-)
If CD's fingerprint (you need the ID code for the copy-protection to work) is found anywhere it's not supposed to be: call "Piracy Police."
If someone tries to register this CD's ID a second time, call "Piracy Police." Doesn't matter if is same computer.;-)
I'm sure they'll be even more imaginative than we are. Maybe they'll use the CDR part for a time bomb. After one year of use, it blows up. Won't it be "fun"!!!;-)
Linux is incredibly slow when compared to Windows.
You don't know what you are talking about. I've run plenty of Linux and M$ configurations, and every time Linux has been faster. My 500Mhz K6-2 Linux system takes less than 30 seconds to boot, including the 10-15 seconds the BIOS takes.
Windows simply handles multithreading better.
Yeah whatever. Linux handles forking many times better.
Mozilla takes 2x as long to open in linux and if I try to open multiple apps at once, it takes minutes for any of them to come up.
What are you comparing against? Mozilla on Linux vs IE on Windows? You do realize MS preloads the IE binaries on boot? If it's Mozilla on each platform, I'd want to know why it takes longer. Does your binary have GNOME/KDE dependencies? The developers may also have put in MS Windows specific stuff--Netscape's primary focus was and is MS Windows for the most part, and their developers suck--which is why Mozilla/Netscape Navigator are so bloated and crappy in the first place.
The reason it takes so long to start up because it is a bloated piece of crap, and the other apps who take minutes to come up must be bloated too. (you mentioned KDE, it is not essential, and it is very bloated. It also requires a daemon called DCOP, which probably accounts for half the startup time.) This is why your "linux" apps take a long time to start.
I don't run KDE or GNOME. Most of my programs don't take more than 5 seconds to load, and start instantly if their files are already in my cache. The only two that don't are GIMP and Mozilla. The GIMP takes less than 15 seconds, and only so because it has tonnes of plugins to load. Mozilla is bloated like I said.
And you can tell the I/O is crap just by looking at KDE's performance when compared to Win2k. Windows just flies.
Yes, KDE's performance. Not the performance of Linux. Not XFree86's performance. KDE's performance. You do not need KDE or GNOME to run a Linux workstation. I don't get why people do this.
Part of this of course is that my version of Linux (Debian) can be recompiled to run on many platforms and everyone can tell you that portability comes at the cost of platform-specific performance.
A bogus statement. If you have a good compiler[1] and use optimizing flags, then cross-"platform"[2] programs don't have a significant performance hit, and not any more than MS's designs. There are some types of applications where assembly language (meaning processor specific instructions) will make the program perform better, but if you look closely, many of the open source projects which will benefit from this already do it--for at least the IA32 (80386+) processors, if not others.
[1] gcc 2.95.3 is good enough for me, but I hear Intel's Linux compiler works even better for processors made by Intel. The assumption where cross platform applications don't perform well is FUD spread by Microsoft.
[2] Here I think you mean different processor designs, but it can apply to different operating systems too.
What are you a kindergarden teacher??? Let me guess, if you were governor of your state, you would execute random people from time to time, until the murder rate became very small. Then again, the murder rate would never be very small, because you'd be murdering tonnes of people!
This mentality doesn't work at all. For one thing, most criminals won't care if other people get inconvenienced, punished, or killed. They won't stop what they're doing because they don't care about anyone else. They think they have the "right" to do anything they want. And another, punishing innocent people and taking away everyone's rights is a crime. P2P filesharing is the modern day equivalent of the press, and making it effectively illegal is "abridging the freedom of speech," and "of the press." Not only that, many won't see the point in following the law because they will end up being punished no matter what they do.
The United States has become completely fucked up, not only because innocent people are flagrantly punished for others' crimes (such as this case), but because criminals are assisted by the "justice" system--such as the unchecked patent system allowing extortion on massive scales, people who are able to make a living by frivolous lawsuits, and so on. In fact, Our economy is no longer a free market, it is a theif market: where "sellers" abuse the system to con, steal, and lock everyone else out of the market.
In fact, if you look at it, this case is about the {RI,MP}AA abusing the system to lock people out of being able to distribute information. The {RI,MP}AA tries to claim they have a "right" to be a monopoly for distribution of any sort of information--music, movies, news, &etc. The whole assumption of their statements are that anything produced is their property, and no one else can claim any copyrights, because according to them, no one else is able to produce any music, movies, and so on. Music didn't exist before the RIAA? If someone records a kid's birthday with a camcorder, that person is copying a movie??? It's all bullshit.
Interesting... I started looking, and I found
Citation analysis of pathology journals reveals need for a journal of applied virology!. It's from 1973 and the first paragraph seems to describe PageRank exactly (except in terms of scientific journals instead of web pages), and the way it's stated, it seems to be a reference to a system which was already widely used. Sounds like Google reinvented the wheel...
You are a bit off. It would be more like if they suspected you had a copy of their artwork, they could break into your residence.
Say you made an original painting titled "Moaning Lisa" and the MPAA claimed they owned the copyright to a different work called "Mona Lisa" (The famous Mona Lisa with a mustache painted on). The name is similar, so you are immediately suspect. They call their goon squad, who then break into your apartment and smash everything up.
The next day, a lawyer visits your landlord and demands you be evicted, otherwise your landlord won't have the safeguards of the "safe harbour" provisions of the DMCA and can be sued under copyright laws. You get kicked out and your stuff is thrown into the street. Your only means of appeal is to find your landlord and sign a statement saying you didn't violate copyright laws, to which he has 14 days to respond.
Oh yeah, and you wouldn't be able to transport anything (not even bread you baked yourself) unless it has a special "MPAA approved" tag on it. Licenses for creating those tags start at one million dollars.
Don't worry, things are much worse than you think.;-)
On one of the Neuros surveys, it asked which new format you prefer they add support, and FLAC was one of them. I thought FLAC was a lossless format so one could record and edit sound files, not for listening? Do audiophiles really notice the difference between a high quality ogg/mp3 and FLAC? I don't notice any distortions with a high quality ogg vs the original. Is the FLAC file smaller? Logically and from what I've seen, the FLAC file should be bigger. It is lossless after all...
There was free music back then. Not if you went to a concert, but if you had any friends or neighbors, there was plenty of free music. Haven't you ever heard of barn dances? They didn't charge anyone, they just used someone's barn, and a few farmers would play the fiddle.
City dwellers would play the piano in their parlor. That's what the room was for--entertaining guests. Music was part of the entertainment. They usually didn't hire anyone, because so many people knew how to play musical instruments. Did you think they went to see movies or watched tv? Those didn't exist.
Television, movies and recorded music has made it so very few try to learn how to entertain because someone else does it for them. Entertainment has become a niche market. There are people who want to entertain (for free), but pre-internet they didn't have any way to distribute their recordings to the masses. Just look for the stories, movies (not much of this, but wait until real broadband comes alive), and music--there is a lot of it out their. Yes, most of it is not polished (I think only superficial people really care about that anyway). Yes, lots of the stories and movies are fan based fiction, so the characters are not compeletely original, but most of the story is. If you call what they do "stealing", then Disney and most of the parody producers belong in jail for a long, long time.
Did you look at how much they said they were charging? Doing the math, the prices quoted by Han Hong: 70 yuan -> $8.40, and she's whining about having to slash her prices to 15 yuan ($1.80).
I'm no expert on China, but it's my understanding the average monthly income is about the equivalent of $100. Would you really pay almost 10% of your monthly income for one CD? What if they charged $200 per CD in the US? How many do you think they'd sell????
The UCITA is very friendly to ecommerce. Just put a license agreement on your website that says: "Each time you download a page off this site, you agree to the following: You will pay a $5 fee. You will force at least 10 new people to visit this site. You will visit this site again within 12 hours." Hire a few lawyers, wait for the entire population of the Earth become hooked into this scheme, and let the money roll in!
I don't know what people were complaining about USB or why (probably the usual trolls), but so many people against winmodems because of legitimate reasons--I think so anyway.
Winmodems are crap -- they are not modems. They are just soundcards with a telephone jack connector. This allows them to be cheaply made, but at the expense of using lots of CPU time on your computer. It's like getting a processor downgrade.
The manufacturers of these modems didn't want to give out any specs and as usual didn't produce any non-windows drivers. It's hard to write a driver when the manufacturer keeps the interface secret.
Even if they got the hardware specs, writing a driver for this things would be very difficult. As I said, they are not modems, so the driver code has to process the signal to understand anything and produce signal data to send anything.
I think at one point, some company was claiming a patent on the method for coding the signal, or something essential anyway...
This caused a very anti-winmodem sentiment in much of the Linux community. I remember one guy announced he was trying to create a windmodem driver. He got flamed bigtime for it too. I didn't see why any anti-winmodem people should care if someone tried to write a driver, but they were'nt just "winmodems suck" posts, many of them were more like "proprietary winmodems are against free software." I wouldn't be surprised if RMS himself didn't make some anti-winmodem announcement somewhere...
You are slightly wrong. You can steal "intellectual property".
Everytime someone takes another's invention and patents it, they steal from that person. Everytime someone takes a very basic obvious idea (or one with tonnes of prior art) and patents it, they steal from the general public. Everytime someone takes another's work and copyrights it, they steal. Everytime someone makes a DMCA compaint for a work that isn't theirs or isn't copyrightable (such as price lists), they steal. Everytime someone trademarks a common word, name, or phrase, they steal. Everytime a lobby group / lawyer / representative / judge expands copyright, patent, or trademark law beyond what those laws were intended to protect, they steal.
Many shady companies and people have been doing this for years.
What you are talking about is old fashioned authentication and encryption.
DRM is where the system controls what you can do. It will only let you copy or view files their specified number of times. It will make sure the files are only produced by "trusted" people and/or computers. It will delete files if they are beyond their expiration date or are marked as "pirate" files.
Even worse, what if you name a file "Plant potter on sorcerer stone.jpg", and one of the idiots running the fingerprinting system decide to mark it as an infringing copy because the name is similar to "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? The potential for unintentional (or intentional) using this system censorship is huge.
It has already been shown by the ACLU report that the big media companies aren't careful about which files they claim are infringing, not to mention web censorship software. This is the main reason DRM systems concern me so much. They can restrict who is allowed to publish.
When you're dealing with onsey-twoseys, it's not a big deal, especially with these new high speed 52x replicators (of which I have one). But, imagine:
Hire a bunch of people, at $11/hour (and then add benefits, insurance, etc etc).
They have to process requests, and even at optimum efficiency probably only produce anywhere from 10-20 discs/hour (gotta verify contents, etc). Then pack those discs up and get them mailed out. That starts to become pricey and then they're charging $20/disc to make it "worth their time"
Sounds like you have several people waiting for one burner to get done. I see you've never worked in a mass production environment. My factory math may be rusty, but benefit from the experience of a veteran.;-)
Even using stock off the shelf equipment from CompUSA, you could do much better than that. Lets assume your CDs are 52 min long (so they take 1 min to burn), and verification takes the same amount of time as burning. That gives you two minutes per disc on each burner.
Lets say you have two workers. One puts on the CD label, puts the CD in the case, replaces with blank CD in drive. The other puts in the insert, closes the case, puts the thing in a shipping box, and slaps a shipping label on the box. Even a dead cat with arthritis could do each job in 30 seconds. If the inserts have to be cut or folded, it may take a little extra time. Cutting can be done beforehand, but a pre folded sheet won't print well.;-) Also you'll need some sort of printer which can print both sides by itself, otherwise I predict it'll be a mess.;-)...unless you decide to print on only one side of the inserts.
This ties up each burner for at most 150 seconds--120 s for burning, and 30 s while your worker fumbles around. # of burners needed = 150s/30s = 5 burners. # of CDs per hour = 60 min / (.5 min / 1 CD ) = 120 CDs/hr. Lets say total cost per worker (including benefits) is $13/hr. Labor cost per CD = $13 * 2 workers / 120 CDs = $0.22. The cost of materials (CD-R, slim case, paper, and ink) can't be more than $1.50--I don't pay more for those materials myself, and I bought retail and have a rip-off HP printer with rip-off ink cartridge prices.
I didn't factor in the cost of taking orders and shipping. I assume taking an order over the phone wouldn't cost a huge amount. Anyone know? $1/order, $2? Probably less for a web site. Shipping, well most sites not only charge separate for it, they also add a handling charge. Cover your ordering and packaging costs too!;-)
You'll also need a script to coordinate and handle all this--if the packaging guys have to do lots of typing, it'll slow them way down. A properly formed script will eliminate any need for interaction. It just has to pull the CD info and address from a database and start the burning and printing processes and eject the CD at the right time. I'm sure any ol' script kiddie could write it.
Also, your figure for pay seems a bit high to me. When I was doing that sort of thing, we were only paid minimum wage or a little more. What's it at now? about $6/hr? Yeah, if you run your operations in an overpopulated area with a high cost of living (like San Francisco or New York City), you'll have to pay workers $11/hr or more, and they'll be living in a cardboard box, but other places can be more resonable.
Why don't they put a hand crank on the side so you can recharge the thing? Then they could have a really bright screen and a fast power-hungry processor. I can see it now. All the kiddies playing their games and cranking on the box like a monkey! Well, okay, more like the organ grinder who owns the monkey. In fact, the game's goal could be to keep the unit charged.;-)
I don't know, but I'd imagine a company would use trade secret laws for this sort of thing--not the DMCA. Unless they copyrighted how their circuit boards look. (not the design, just the look);-)
What are you talking about? If you paid attention or read the article, you'd know that was a quote from the Google Watch site. Even if one slashdot poster ever did say that, only an idiot would would make the assumption he/she is talking for all slashdot posters.
Slashdot Mirror
Good points, but I'm sure it's possible to make a machine which fools the device into thinking a thief is really you. From how I understand iris recognition, it just looks at your eyes visually. If someone had your iris scan, what's to stop them from using a LCD display (or other device) in front of the scanner? Would contacts with your iris pattern printed on them work?
Once a thief has your iris data, how could you change it so the thief can't get to your bank account? You'd be screwed.
What if it was sent to their hosting service / ISP / upstream provider? From what I understand, most DMCA complaints are sent to the organization who runs the network (for practical reasons) instead of the person who is accused.
IANAL, but can't they charge the people at IDSA for perjury or fraud? I'm sure sending false DMCA complaints is against some law. Don't they have to write "under penalty of perjury" somewhere when they file a DMCA complaint??? At the very least, these guys should be able to sue IDSA for slander / libel.
Until the victims of false DMCA complaints do something, these companies will keep it up...
So anyone who makes a space game where the player shoots up asteroids / meteors will get sued by Atari?
The poster's point was he can buy the parts and put the computer together himself. If you know how to buy parts and assemble a computer, "build your own" is a very cheap way to get a high quality system. It's not going to be a bargan basement Dell computer at all. You can get quality brand name parts for decent prices.
From what I've seen, Dell / Gateway / Compaq all are expensive (compared to BYO) and seem to cut corners somewhere (often using cheap parts). The only real added value to buying one of these systems is you get tech support, and you don't have to assemble the computer yourself. If you know what you're doing, you don't need either option.
Though for a pre-built brand name computer, Macs seem to be better and have comparable prices.
I see your point, but can't someone just take a CDR, burn their trojan horse programs on it, somehow produce a label with logos on the top to make it look like a legit CDROM, and pass it on to the victim? The hardest part would be making the label, which for someone with a lot of time on his hands (who else would do this?) would probably take at most a day to get it perfect.
Can also work this way:
I'm sure they'll be even more imaginative than we are. Maybe they'll use the CDR part for a time bomb. After one year of use, it blows up. Won't it be "fun"!!! ;-)
You don't know what you are talking about. I've run plenty of Linux and M$ configurations, and every time Linux has been faster. My 500Mhz K6-2 Linux system takes less than 30 seconds to boot, including the 10-15 seconds the BIOS takes.
Yeah whatever. Linux handles forking many times better.
What are you comparing against? Mozilla on Linux vs IE on Windows? You do realize MS preloads the IE binaries on boot? If it's Mozilla on each platform, I'd want to know why it takes longer. Does your binary have GNOME/KDE dependencies? The developers may also have put in MS Windows specific stuff--Netscape's primary focus was and is MS Windows for the most part, and their developers suck--which is why Mozilla/Netscape Navigator are so bloated and crappy in the first place.
The reason it takes so long to start up because it is a bloated piece of crap, and the other apps who take minutes to come up must be bloated too. (you mentioned KDE, it is not essential, and it is very bloated. It also requires a daemon called DCOP, which probably accounts for half the startup time.) This is why your "linux" apps take a long time to start.
I don't run KDE or GNOME. Most of my programs don't take more than 5 seconds to load, and start instantly if their files are already in my cache. The only two that don't are GIMP and Mozilla. The GIMP takes less than 15 seconds, and only so because it has tonnes of plugins to load. Mozilla is bloated like I said.
Yes, KDE's performance. Not the performance of Linux. Not XFree86's performance. KDE's performance. You do not need KDE or GNOME to run a Linux workstation. I don't get why people do this.
A bogus statement. If you have a good compiler[1] and use optimizing flags, then cross-"platform"[2] programs don't have a significant performance hit, and not any more than MS's designs. There are some types of applications where assembly language (meaning processor specific instructions) will make the program perform better, but if you look closely, many of the open source projects which will benefit from this already do it--for at least the IA32 (80386+) processors, if not others.
[1] gcc 2.95.3 is good enough for me, but I hear Intel's Linux compiler works even better for processors made by Intel. The assumption where cross platform applications don't perform well is FUD spread by Microsoft.
[2] Here I think you mean different processor designs, but it can apply to different operating systems too.
What are you a kindergarden teacher??? Let me guess, if you were governor of your state, you would execute random people from time to time, until the murder rate became very small. Then again, the murder rate would never be very small, because you'd be murdering tonnes of people!
This mentality doesn't work at all. For one thing, most criminals won't care if other people get inconvenienced, punished, or killed. They won't stop what they're doing because they don't care about anyone else. They think they have the "right" to do anything they want. And another, punishing innocent people and taking away everyone's rights is a crime. P2P filesharing is the modern day equivalent of the press, and making it effectively illegal is "abridging the freedom of speech," and "of the press." Not only that, many won't see the point in following the law because they will end up being punished no matter what they do.
The United States has become completely fucked up, not only because innocent people are flagrantly punished for others' crimes (such as this case), but because criminals are assisted by the "justice" system--such as the unchecked patent system allowing extortion on massive scales, people who are able to make a living by frivolous lawsuits, and so on. In fact, Our economy is no longer a free market, it is a theif market: where "sellers" abuse the system to con, steal, and lock everyone else out of the market.
In fact, if you look at it, this case is about the {RI,MP}AA abusing the system to lock people out of being able to distribute information. The {RI,MP}AA tries to claim they have a "right" to be a monopoly for distribution of any sort of information--music, movies, news, &etc. The whole assumption of their statements are that anything produced is their property, and no one else can claim any copyrights, because according to them, no one else is able to produce any music, movies, and so on. Music didn't exist before the RIAA? If someone records a kid's birthday with a camcorder, that person is copying a movie??? It's all bullshit.
Interesting... I started looking, and I found Citation analysis of pathology journals reveals need for a journal of applied virology!. It's from 1973 and the first paragraph seems to describe PageRank exactly (except in terms of scientific journals instead of web pages), and the way it's stated, it seems to be a reference to a system which was already widely used. Sounds like Google reinvented the wheel...
You are a bit off. It would be more like if they suspected you had a copy of their artwork, they could break into your residence.
Say you made an original painting titled "Moaning Lisa" and the MPAA claimed they owned the copyright to a different work called "Mona Lisa" (The famous Mona Lisa with a mustache painted on). The name is similar, so you are immediately suspect. They call their goon squad, who then break into your apartment and smash everything up.
The next day, a lawyer visits your landlord and demands you be evicted, otherwise your landlord won't have the safeguards of the "safe harbour" provisions of the DMCA and can be sued under copyright laws. You get kicked out and your stuff is thrown into the street. Your only means of appeal is to find your landlord and sign a statement saying you didn't violate copyright laws, to which he has 14 days to respond.
Oh yeah, and you wouldn't be able to transport anything (not even bread you baked yourself) unless it has a special "MPAA approved" tag on it. Licenses for creating those tags start at one million dollars.
Don't worry, things are much worse than you think. ;-)
On one of the Neuros surveys, it asked which new format you prefer they add support, and FLAC was one of them. I thought FLAC was a lossless format so one could record and edit sound files, not for listening? Do audiophiles really notice the difference between a high quality ogg/mp3 and FLAC? I don't notice any distortions with a high quality ogg vs the original. Is the FLAC file smaller? Logically and from what I've seen, the FLAC file should be bigger. It is lossless after all...
There was free music back then. Not if you went to a concert, but if you had any friends or neighbors, there was plenty of free music. Haven't you ever heard of barn dances? They didn't charge anyone, they just used someone's barn, and a few farmers would play the fiddle.
City dwellers would play the piano in their parlor. That's what the room was for--entertaining guests. Music was part of the entertainment. They usually didn't hire anyone, because so many people knew how to play musical instruments. Did you think they went to see movies or watched tv? Those didn't exist.
Television, movies and recorded music has made it so very few try to learn how to entertain because someone else does it for them. Entertainment has become a niche market. There are people who want to entertain (for free), but pre-internet they didn't have any way to distribute their recordings to the masses. Just look for the stories, movies (not much of this, but wait until real broadband comes alive), and music--there is a lot of it out their. Yes, most of it is not polished (I think only superficial people really care about that anyway). Yes, lots of the stories and movies are fan based fiction, so the characters are not compeletely original, but most of the story is. If you call what they do "stealing", then Disney and most of the parody producers belong in jail for a long, long time.
Yeah, but you'll still be able to see them, which means you can just retype the document into the window of any word processing program...
Then why was they guy who wrote DeCSS arrested?
Did you look at how much they said they were charging? Doing the math, the prices quoted by Han Hong: 70 yuan -> $8.40, and she's whining about having to slash her prices to 15 yuan ($1.80).
I'm no expert on China, but it's my understanding the average monthly income is about the equivalent of $100. Would you really pay almost 10% of your monthly income for one CD? What if they charged $200 per CD in the US? How many do you think they'd sell????
The UCITA is very friendly to ecommerce. Just put a license agreement on your website that says: "Each time you download a page off this site, you agree to the following: You will pay a $5 fee. You will force at least 10 new people to visit this site. You will visit this site again within 12 hours." Hire a few lawyers, wait for the entire population of the Earth become hooked into this scheme, and let the money roll in!
I don't know what people were complaining about USB or why (probably the usual trolls), but so many people against winmodems because of legitimate reasons--I think so anyway.
This caused a very anti-winmodem sentiment in much of the Linux community. I remember one guy announced he was trying to create a windmodem driver. He got flamed bigtime for it too. I didn't see why any anti-winmodem people should care if someone tried to write a driver, but they were'nt just "winmodems suck" posts, many of them were more like "proprietary winmodems are against free software." I wouldn't be surprised if RMS himself didn't make some anti-winmodem announcement somewhere...
You are slightly wrong. You can steal "intellectual property".
Everytime someone takes another's invention and patents it, they steal from that person. Everytime someone takes a very basic obvious idea (or one with tonnes of prior art) and patents it, they steal from the general public. Everytime someone takes another's work and copyrights it, they steal. Everytime someone makes a DMCA compaint for a work that isn't theirs or isn't copyrightable (such as price lists), they steal. Everytime someone trademarks a common word, name, or phrase, they steal. Everytime a lobby group / lawyer / representative / judge expands copyright, patent, or trademark law beyond what those laws were intended to protect, they steal.
Many shady companies and people have been doing this for years.
What you are talking about is old fashioned authentication and encryption.
DRM is where the system controls what you can do. It will only let you copy or view files their specified number of times. It will make sure the files are only produced by "trusted" people and/or computers. It will delete files if they are beyond their expiration date or are marked as "pirate" files.
Even worse, what if you name a file "Plant potter on sorcerer stone.jpg", and one of the idiots running the fingerprinting system decide to mark it as an infringing copy because the name is similar to "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? The potential for unintentional (or intentional) using this system censorship is huge.
It has already been shown by the ACLU report that the big media companies aren't careful about which files they claim are infringing, not to mention web censorship software. This is the main reason DRM systems concern me so much. They can restrict who is allowed to publish.
Sounds like you have several people waiting for one burner to get done. I see you've never worked in a mass production environment. My factory math may be rusty, but benefit from the experience of a veteran. ;-)
Even using stock off the shelf equipment from CompUSA, you could do much better than that. Lets assume your CDs are 52 min long (so they take 1 min to burn), and verification takes the same amount of time as burning. That gives you two minutes per disc on each burner.
Lets say you have two workers. One puts on the CD label, puts the CD in the case, replaces with blank CD in drive. The other puts in the insert, closes the case, puts the thing in a shipping box, and slaps a shipping label on the box. Even a dead cat with arthritis could do each job in 30 seconds. If the inserts have to be cut or folded, it may take a little extra time. Cutting can be done beforehand, but a pre folded sheet won't print well. ;-) Also you'll need some sort of printer which can print both sides by itself, otherwise I predict it'll be a mess. ;-) ...unless you decide to print on only one side of the inserts.
This ties up each burner for at most 150 seconds--120 s for burning, and 30 s while your worker fumbles around. # of burners needed = 150s /30s = 5 burners. # of CDs per hour = 60 min / ( .5 min / 1 CD ) = 120 CDs/hr. Lets say total cost per worker (including benefits) is $13/hr. Labor cost per CD = $13 * 2 workers / 120 CDs = $0.22. The cost of materials (CD-R, slim case, paper, and ink) can't be more than $1.50--I don't pay more for those materials myself, and I bought retail and have a rip-off HP printer with rip-off ink cartridge prices.
I didn't factor in the cost of taking orders and shipping. I assume taking an order over the phone wouldn't cost a huge amount. Anyone know? $1/order, $2? Probably less for a web site. Shipping, well most sites not only charge separate for it, they also add a handling charge. Cover your ordering and packaging costs too! ;-)
You'll also need a script to coordinate and handle all this--if the packaging guys have to do lots of typing, it'll slow them way down. A properly formed script will eliminate any need for interaction. It just has to pull the CD info and address from a database and start the burning and printing processes and eject the CD at the right time. I'm sure any ol' script kiddie could write it.
Also, your figure for pay seems a bit high to me. When I was doing that sort of thing, we were only paid minimum wage or a little more. What's it at now? about $6/hr? Yeah, if you run your operations in an overpopulated area with a high cost of living (like San Francisco or New York City), you'll have to pay workers $11/hr or more, and they'll be living in a cardboard box, but other places can be more resonable.
Why don't they put a hand crank on the side so you can recharge the thing? Then they could have a really bright screen and a fast power-hungry processor. I can see it now. All the kiddies playing their games and cranking on the box like a monkey! Well, okay, more like the organ grinder who owns the monkey. In fact, the game's goal could be to keep the unit charged. ;-)
I don't know, but I'd imagine a company would use trade secret laws for this sort of thing--not the DMCA. Unless they copyrighted how their circuit boards look. (not the design, just the look) ;-)
What are you talking about? If you paid attention or read the article, you'd know that was a quote from the Google Watch site. Even if one slashdot poster ever did say that, only an idiot would would make the assumption he/she is talking for all slashdot posters.