You jest, but I think the whole concept of a subaudible "no record" flag, which causes recording devices to instantly turn themselves off or garble the recording, is intensely 1984-esque.
The situation you're talking about is only the beginning. There are lots of things that you could prevent people from recording, with sensitive enough watermarking circuits. Heck, you could probably print T-shirts with special patterns on them, that stopped cameras from recording -- after all, we don't want people making "embarassing" videos of our local gendarmes with their cameraphones.
You can say it's tinfoil-hattism, but once you start mandating specific circuits into everyday devices, which have no purpose other than to serve political ends, you've really opened Pandora's Box. Basically, you've said that if you have enough money (enough to buy Congress, as the content industry has), you can make yourself un-recordable.
I guess a native binary blob is slightly better than a MS coded binary blob
It's significantly better, actually. Not because it's technically superior (although it may be), but because it can legally be rolled into a commercial version of Linux. Right now, you can't legally distribute a Linux distro with multimedia support (at least not in the U.S.), because they depend either on MS DLLs (obvious copyright problems) or patent-encumbered free implementations (which can't be distributed with the distro for legal reasons).
This makes Linux into a second-rate desktop OS, even if you're willing to pay for it, because it means key features don't work out of the box. There have been exceptions to this from time to time (Xandros, Lindows), but they weren't well accepted by the community, possibly because they tried to leverage their use of proprietary codecs as an advantage over other Linux distros, rather than against Windows -- not a good way to make friends.
A company which wasn't involved in the actual production of a distro, might be in a good position (assuming it dealt with everyone on the same terms) to produce codecs that could be incorporated into (a non-free, pay-per-copy) version of any distro. E.g., someone could take Ubuntu, add the codecs (paying Fluendo, obviously), and sell the result as a package, suitable for pre-installation. I don't think this would violate GPL either, if the codecs were built in a way that didn't require linking or otherwise producing a "derived work."
In short, Fluendo could be in a position to be ESR's "Streaming Penguin." In that paper, he discusses some of the major problems facing Linux as a marketable desktop OS, and the lack of modern multimedia capabilities are a real deal-breaker. In fact, the lack of multimedia capabilities are more of a weakness, than simply being free-as-in-beer is a strength; people are obviously willing to pay for an OS that works, but one that doesn't work out of the box (or works only after fiddling around with some shady instructions involving PLF mirrors) won't fly, even if it's free.
While people here on Slashdot may not regard having to manually install LAME, Xvid, Flash, and the Win32 codecs as a significant problem, it's one of the many reasons why you can't go out and buy a Dell pre-configured with Linux as a home computer. Even if there wasn't Microsoft trying to torpedo it before it gets going, I'm not sure customers would accept anything that didn't work right, right out of the box. Fluendo could, if they play their cards right, be a big benefit to the adoption of Linux.
...I'll tell him to be on the lookout for any coworkers who show up with new Porsches, Corvettes, etc., in the coming weeks. I think it would stick out just a little.
Exactly. Apple has shown in the past that they are capable of recompiling their OS for different architectures -- they did it from PPC and x86 -- why wouldn't they just have recompiled a stripped-down kernel for ARM? After all, they have all the source code, so if anyone could do it, it would be them.
This article just doesn't make any sense. I don't know if the Slashdot editors were looking for an anti-Apple article so as to appear to be giving "equal time," but this is pretty idiotic. There are better criticisms of Apple in general, and of the iPhone in particular, than this.
Isn't this how CSS was cracked eventually? The first hacks intercepted the keys from a player that stored them in a fixed location in memory, as this HD-DVD crack does, but later versions actually broke the encryption scheme without reliance on any existing code or players.
And wasn't the eventual mode of attack something related to weak initialization vectors, too? I might be confusing CSS with WEP here, but I thought that it was some poor implementation of IVs that led to a catastrophic reduction in the keyspace, allowing someone to easily brute-force the key.
Even if it was WEP and not CSS that was broken due to weak IVs, you'd think the AACS people would have learned.
Of course, given the inherent flaws in DRM, I'd have thought they've learned that they were playing Sisyphus by now, but it seems not.
This is getting OT, but if you want an abject example of why people start going for their gun closet every time things start to go unhinged, you don't need to look much further than New Orleans just after Katrina. The second you took away the police presence and most of the civil infrastructure, the place went to hell in a handbasket; next thing you know, we were hearing about reports of, in addition to the usual looting and arson, roving "rape gangs" wandering the streets.
This doesn't surprise me in the slightest. American culture is dichotomous; on the surface, we have a basically orderly society, one with a respect for other individuals, and the use of non-violent means of conflict resolution (taking each other to court, typically). However, there is a dark, latent underbelly to our society; one where violence is praised, 'rough justice' is celebrated, and you're entitled to whatever you can take, by hook or by crook, from anyone else. (Take a look at popular culture through the past century if you want examples.) Most of the time, the social structures of civil society keep a lid on the darker aspects, releasing them only when it's appropriate. But when those checks disappear -- when the infrastructure that normally acts as a disincentive to people's baser impulses falls apart -- things go downhill, quickly. Any major city in the U.S. is only about 24 hours away from looking like a deleted scene from Mad Max, if you take away the police and other control channels.
As I've never lived for any significant time in anywhere but the U.S., I can't make any comparisons to other cultures. It may be entirely possible that in other places, all the police could take a holiday and nobody would notice. (And in rural parts of America, this is probably the case.) However, I can absolutely assure you that would not be the case in urban or suburban regions where I've lived.
Well it is big news to business, I am guessing that the company that built it and the company that insured it are a little upset right now.
Why do you think that? They've all been paid; it's the government's (read: your tax dollars) loss, not the manufacturers. The government doesn't generally go to outside insurers for this sort of thing; when an expensive piece of equipment goes on the fritz, they -- by which I mean us -- pretty much just have to eat the cost.
If anything, the contractor is probably deciding on when it would be polite to just drop into conversation that yes, they still have all the plans for the satellite sitting around somewhere, and no, they're certainly not too busy to crank out another one, for an appropriate price.
I'm sure some of the engineers and designers that worked on the bird are probably disappointed that it'll never get to perform its function, whatever that was, but when you build spacecraft of any type for a living, you learn to deal with disappointment. It's one of the few things left in this world that still has some real risk to it. You can easily spend 3-5 years (or more) of your life building a satellite, only to have the launch vehicle go off-course during launch, and have the RSO blow all your hard work to smithereens. It comes with the territory.
Plus, it's not like the people that built it were ever going to know anything about it, if it did work. It would have just disappeared into the very black world of the NRO; I doubt they had much in the way of emotional attachment to it.
As an anti-satellite weapon. It would launch a special shell in space that would explode near the target satellite, covering it with sticky material and blinding it.
Who was their defense contractor on that idea? Lone Starr and a certain rotund guy with a tail named Barf?
The DirectTV people probably could come up with a way to only transmit programming to people who've paid for it, say via careful distribution of encryption keys or hardware, but they choose not to because it's easier to make a weak technological solution and then buy some laws that prevent reverse-engineering. This is a serious problem, and it's the beginning of a whole lot of bad laws we're burdened with now.
I have no problem if companies decide to try and encrypt their content. If they want to tie it down, lock it to hardware, whatever; go for it. But where I draw the line is when they started getting involved in the legislative process and making it illegal for people to break their chains, even when it was clear that people had the right to use the content in ways that the 'chains' prohibited.
If DirectTV is broadcasting its signal onto my property, then I ought to be able to set up a 1m dish and an LNB amplifier and a signal processor, and do whatever I want with the incoming electrons, as long as I don't take the results outside of my property (e.g. rebroadcasting them in a way that causes them to leave my property). That it's illegal for me to set up a dish and a few analog parts, and perform some mathematical transformations to the resulting signal, is absolutely ridiculous, and represents the height of governmental pandering to corporate interests.
Corporations should be free to attempt to restrict and encrypt their content as much as they want. But individuals should be allowed do whatever they want with the signals that they're given, particularly when they're being broadcast over the EM spectrum, which is inherently a public resource.
The anti-circumvention laws about satellite TV broadcasts in the 1980s are where we really started to go wrong with technology laws in this country, and it's a very direct path from there through to the DMCA. It's nothing but laziness: as long as its easier to get a law passed than to build robust systems, companies will always go to Congress with bags of cash in hand.
The point you're making is quite true; having more people in the global economy increases net production capacity, which results in greater output, which over time increases the standard of living for everyone. Obviously, you couldn't have the standard of living we enjoy now, if you were the only person on earth. This is all true.
Unfortunately it's mostly a red herring in the context of this discussion. In talking about legal vs illegal labor, the question isn't whether some laborers exist or not, but where they are and what market they're competing in. There's a difference between a discussion of the Economy of the world as a whole, and a discussion of a regional economy that exists within the larger world economy, but is decoupled from it in various ways.
So while the presence of a large pool of laborers may be a net good to the Economy as a whole (i.e., if they somehow didn't exist, the world would be poorer and everyone's quality of life would suffer somewhat), this doesn't say anything about whether it's beneficial to have those same individuals in a particular regional economy. California's economy might well be better off without those workers in it. There's a big difference. Discussing whether the regional economy of California, or even the U.S., would benefit from laws that made illegal immigration and employment harder doesn't say anything about whether the existence of those people is ultimately beneficial or harmful to the greater world economy, it's limited only to their location (i.e., "U.S. or Mexico" etc.).
So while everything that you (and the A.C.) were saying may be correct, it doesn't have much direct bearing on the situation.
Worst case, at some point American production falls so low that no one wants to buy anything from you any more... In that case we all get to experience a run on the dollar, and a global economic realignment. Who knows what the world will look like after that, but it won't look much like what we have now.
This seems to be the crux of it. In my opinion, we're at that first stage ("no one wants to buy anything") already, and we basically arrived there when we started seriously running up the trade deficit. Sure, there are still some big American exports (and probably always will be; we have a lot of exploitable natural resources, after all) but they're dwarfed by imports. The rest of the world is a whole lot less interested in American goods, than Americans are in foreign goods.
What you so politely term a "global economic realignment" is what concerns me. It seems to be the proverbial elephant in the room that nobody in the U.S. government wants to admit exists, much less actually discuss. (Perhaps because they all have their money invested in the stock of well-diversified multinationals?) I rather suspect that said 'realignment' could involve a lot of unsavory stuff on the domestic side (like riots, and expensive buildings being set on fire), when people figure out that their dollar-denominated bank accounts are suddenly worth very little on the international market. To be honest, that sounds a lot like the sort of thing that one would want to have a large pile of gold bullion, canned food, and ammunition stockpiled in the event of. (And just when I thought that Y2K stash would never pan out.)
More to the point, it sounds like something that should be avoided at all costs if it's even remotely possible. The major question then becomes: is it avoidable? Or have we gone too far down the path to possibly turn back now, if indeed we ever could, and this is not simply inevitable.
I'm not sure where I implied that I thought that an increase in productivity would result in an aggregate loss of jobs. In the long run, under ideal conditions, it doesn't; historically, we've done pretty well in this regard. So I think we probably agree with each other on this. I'm certainly not advocating Luddism, or any other rejection of increased technology because of the short-run job savings.
The point that I was trying to make is that you can't "compete" with a factory in an area with substantially lower costs (i.e. the Third World) by using technology and making your process more efficient. You can have the most efficient, technologically advanced factory in the world, but it's going to be a temporary advantage. Eventually, someone is going to take the same processes and the same technology, set it up in a low-cost area, and still undercut you. So the "American technology will save us" argument doesn't hold water. (Unless you're planning on having some sort of ridiculous export-control system to prevent foreigners from getting technology, but I think we can all agree that's a stupid and unworkable idea, so let's not say it too loudly around any politicians.)
A net increase in manufacturing efficiency, via new technology or new processes, is a Good Thing in the long run. I'm not debating that. It's just that these increased efficiencies still don't make up for the key problem, which is that it's tough to make a factory in a high-cost area competitive with a factory in a low-cost area. The only advantage the domestic (high cost) factory is going to have, is probably being closer to the end consumers and thus saving on transportation costs...but with high-value, high-technology manufactured goods, the cost of transportation is small enough to still have it work out for the foreign country's favor.
The question that I'm asking -- and I'm not attempting to pose a straw man here, I'm really quite interested and to date have never heard a convincing or reassuring answer -- is that the U.S. seems to have a standard of living which was built on a heavy manufacturing and exports base, as well as a virtual monopoly on the supply of hard currency. Given that we no longer have control of the currency market, and we're a net importer rather than exporter, I don't see how this is sustainable in the long term. I don't think, as a nation, that we really want to sink to the "global mean" after being used to some seriously above-average living for the past half-century, but we seem to be headed there a lot faster than the global mean standard of living is coming up to where we'd be comfortable meeting it.
Anything that puts U.S. firms in direct competition with firms in countries with much lower average standards/costs of living is going to be a losing game for the U.S. There's just no way to win at that. So it looks to me like we're in a bit of a dilemma, and perhaps the only way to win, is not to play.
I had no idea that this new "digital" cable went back to requiring those boxes. The idea that people would tolerate that was so absurd, that I didn't even think that it was a possiblity.
It's quite true. In fact, not only do people put up with boxes (and far bigger boxes than before; they're the size of VCR and put out heat like the bastard stepchild of a Pentium IV and a coffeepot), they pay extra for the pleasure. The reason is that these boxes are currently the only way to get "digital cable" (which is not to be confused with digital television, since the picture is still NTSC, not highdef, in most cases). The selling point of this is that you can have many more channels than before: hundreds of them, compared to the 90-100 with standard analog cable.
The point of this move by the FCC is basically to give people the capability of doing the "cable ready" thing, where you just run a length of coax from the wall to your TV, with digital cable. Unfortunately, it'll never be as easy as in the analog days; even though these new systems won't require a box, they'll still require the rental of a decrypter card, which I assume the cablecos will charge as much for as they charged for a box.
Using active tags and a highly directional antenna on the receiver, I suspect that you can probably "see" a tag from quite a distance away. Active tags transmit continuously, so they don't need a high-strength RF field to give them the juice to operate, like the passive tags inside SpeedPasses, etc.
Examples of active RFID already in use are the EZ Pass boxes used in cars in New England and the Northeast. They have toll gates in New Jersey that you drive through at full speed, and the receivers are up at normal Interstate bridge height (so trucks can go through them). And I doubt very much that they represent anything close to the state-of-the-art with respect to RFID. You can probably do some nice tradeoffs, like enhanced signal processing, when you're not receiving a bunch of tags every second.
Well, that was interesting. I wouldn't say informative, precisely, because I'm not sure what exactly I just read, but interesting.
Let me just get this straight. So someone decided to do this Wikileaks project. They recruit some other, ideologically-motivated ("solidarity!") folks to help. They claim to have a prototype that works, and distribute a leaked document from Somalia of unknown provenance. They create several mailing lists. Lots of cloak-and-dagger stuff, people playing with PGP, etc., ensues. The guy from Cryptome is asked to be the holder of the wikileaks.org domain.
Eventually they decide to try and raise $5M USD from somewhere. Cryptome guy says they're crazy, that everyone will think it's a scam, or that they're a front for the CIA. Wikileaks guys basically say "noted," and move on. Cryptome guy decides it's definitely a scam, pulls out, and publishes the emails, only redacted to remove emails and other identifying information.
Well, I would think that the idea is that this place is a repository for leaked primary-source information, and not one for conjecture. If they're smart, they won't allow text-editing like Wikipedia, but will be more like Wikimedia Commons, allowing people to upload files and comment on them, rather than write articles.
If you could produce some secret NASA documents on the fake moon landing, and scan them in, then this would be the place you'd want to share them. Of course, it would also be the place to share the fake moon-landing documents you just produced in Microsoft Word, printed out, and scanned in, but the reliability of documents is really for the viewer to decide.
What we really need is not another "wiki" for people to re-edit history as they see fit, but a un-censorable file repository and CMS, where people can post files and then other people can download them, without restrictions on the content.
Ok smart guy, lets take that argument to its logical conclusion... we eliminate everyone in the world, except you. No one is competing with you for a job. Are you better off or worse off?
That's not a "logical conclusion," it's a very poor reductio ad absurdum. It doesn't even make sense. Try again.
You're creating a straw man. I could just as easily say: Imagine for a second you have a machine that produces plastic doll parts. It reduces the assembly costs by 50%, but that the machine costs $500,000 to set up and get running. Unfortunately, you make no sales, because even though your machine would allow a U.S. factory to produce plastic dolls competitively with an overseas sweatshop, nobody is going to invest the capital when they can just offshore. The point being that when you allow overseas manufacturers, located in places with substantially lower cost-of- and standards-of-living, there's no reason for domestic firms to even attempt to make themselves competitive.
But anyway, it's just a straw man either way. The fundamental question is "why the hell are we playing this game in the first place?" We know we're going to lose. You can't reasonably expect a factory in a country with things like unions and OSHA and a 40-hour workweek to compete with a country that doesn't. It's not a race, or even "competition." We know who's going to win that race. And it only gets worse: even if, like in my silly example above, the American company does implement some labor-saving manufacturing technology that drops its costs by half, the overseas company can easily do the same thing -- probably more easily, since there's no laws that give them issues when they want to fire half their employees -- and still undercut the domestic firm.
Given that a domestic firm can't possibly compete for any length of time with the foreign one, I think the only solution that seems sustainable is to either block imports by the foreign firm, or apply a tariff to them that represents some metric of the difference in prevailing wages and worker benefits between that country and ours. As a result, if there is a demand in the U.S. for Barbie dolls, the price will go up until it encompasses the true cost of producing them here in the U.S. I'm not a big fan of this path, but I don't really see a better way that seems sustainable for the U.S. over the long term.
I think you are off on a factor of 2 with the price; the lowest I can find is $85 with most places around $100.
But a neat box nonetheless. I suspect that it's probably worth the cost even if you have an old PC kicking around, just because of the reduced power consumption over the system's lifespan.
Ubuntu is really not the solution someone like the GP was looking for. It's a nice general-purpose server distro, but it's certainly not plug and play. And with Ubuntu's server installation, you're not going to be clicking any buttons, because by default there's no GUI.
I think that the dedicated home-server distros like Smoothwall or maybe Coraid's NAS distro would be more what he's looking for. They're not much harder to set up than a typical broadband router -- you just install from a CD and then do your configuration from a web page -- but they provide a lot of functionality, because they run on commodity PC hardware and run Linux (or BSD, depending).
I think the point the GP is making, and it's a good one, is that not everyone wants something that requires any level of configuration. People want things that are plug and play. Luckily, I think the market has seen this and is producing products that try to fill it: VMWare's list of virtual appliances lists dozens of possible candidates.
To be frank, I think that virtual appliances are the future of Linux and its related (*NIX) OSes, as it goes more and more mainstream. Average users don't want to configure things, which is why we've seen a tendency towards pre-rolled desktop distros and LiveCDs. As people's home networks become more substantial, I think home servers are going to be the same way. The geeks and early adopters will configure their own gear, but average folks want something that can shove in an old PC's disk drive and set up once, then never think about again.
How do you become a team lead when you can't get any experience being on the team?
Well that's easy: you go to business school and get an MBA.:)
On a more serious note, I don't think most companies have really thought much about where they're going to get their "team leads" once they've exhausted the supply of experienced people in the U.S., the ones who got trained before so many entry-level jobs went overseas. I think the idea is that they'll take some Indian guy, get him an H1-B, ship him over here and teach him the management stuff.
But your point is a really good one. It should worry us when the entry-level jobs start going overseas, because that's where the people who do the higher-level jobs come from. When all the entry-level jobs are gone, then the companies are going to start complaining that there aren't enough experienced people here in the States, and that they need more work visas. Thus, you outsource the whole company from the bottom up, and when something can't be outsourced, you bring in people on visas, because they're the only ones with the experience to do it anymore.
So your solution depends on getting about a billion Chinese peasants and another billion Indians into single-family houses, cars, TVs, computers, Internet, etc. -- basically, whatever we'd desire as a middle-class existence here in the U.S. -- before the U.S. loses its edge and achieves equilibrium with the rest of the world.
Forgive me if I think that's a little bit of a stretch. It's a laudable goal, but just one I don't see any chance of happening. It seems like it's going to take the rest of the world a lot longer to reach the current quality of life in the U.S., than it's going to take the U.S. to collapse and fall to theirs, if the current situation continues unmodified.
Alternately, they're there to manage teams of outsourced programmers. Most case studies of outsouring that I've read, have showed far higher success rates when someone from the "home office" goes and works with the execution team on-site for the duration of the project as a liaison. Tele-work only goes so far; if you're going to spend a few million bucks on software development, it's worth it to send somebody to be your "boots on the ground" to deal with the problems that naturally come up, and give your organization a face.
I don't know anyone who's actually moved from the U.S. to India, to work as an hourly-wage programmer. But I do know people who have worked or relocated there for a while, to act as team leads for companies that are doing outsourcing work. There's a substantial difference between those two functions: the latter basically only exist because the work is being outsourced from a company on the other side of the globe.
Except how many of those pickers are U.S. Citizens, and how many are actually Mexicans, living in the U.S. illegally?
Maybe there's a reason why they only get paid $0.70 per box: that's all they need to pay to get the workers. If you eliminated the vast supply of cheap, illegal labor, you might create a labor shortage and drive wages up. But when you've got people willing to work for peanuts, that's what the jobs are going to pay.
This cost isn't included in most (at least not that I've seen, anyway) analyses of illegal labor, because it's hard to quantify. The presence of a vast cheap-labor pool prevents wages from increasing, and also prevents mechanized technology from being brought to bear on problems. There's a reason that a mechanical cotton-picker wasn't invented until long after the South's Great Migration: when you had slaves, and later sharecroppers, there was no impetus to spend the capital necessary to mechanize.
Slashdot Mirror
You jest, but I think the whole concept of a subaudible "no record" flag, which causes recording devices to instantly turn themselves off or garble the recording, is intensely 1984-esque.
The situation you're talking about is only the beginning. There are lots of things that you could prevent people from recording, with sensitive enough watermarking circuits. Heck, you could probably print T-shirts with special patterns on them, that stopped cameras from recording -- after all, we don't want people making "embarassing" videos of our local gendarmes with their cameraphones.
You can say it's tinfoil-hattism, but once you start mandating specific circuits into everyday devices, which have no purpose other than to serve political ends, you've really opened Pandora's Box. Basically, you've said that if you have enough money (enough to buy Congress, as the content industry has), you can make yourself un-recordable.
I guess a native binary blob is slightly better than a MS coded binary blob
It's significantly better, actually. Not because it's technically superior (although it may be), but because it can legally be rolled into a commercial version of Linux. Right now, you can't legally distribute a Linux distro with multimedia support (at least not in the U.S.), because they depend either on MS DLLs (obvious copyright problems) or patent-encumbered free implementations (which can't be distributed with the distro for legal reasons).
This makes Linux into a second-rate desktop OS, even if you're willing to pay for it, because it means key features don't work out of the box. There have been exceptions to this from time to time (Xandros, Lindows), but they weren't well accepted by the community, possibly because they tried to leverage their use of proprietary codecs as an advantage over other Linux distros, rather than against Windows -- not a good way to make friends.
A company which wasn't involved in the actual production of a distro, might be in a good position (assuming it dealt with everyone on the same terms) to produce codecs that could be incorporated into (a non-free, pay-per-copy) version of any distro. E.g., someone could take Ubuntu, add the codecs (paying Fluendo, obviously), and sell the result as a package, suitable for pre-installation. I don't think this would violate GPL either, if the codecs were built in a way that didn't require linking or otherwise producing a "derived work."
In short, Fluendo could be in a position to be ESR's "Streaming Penguin." In that paper, he discusses some of the major problems facing Linux as a marketable desktop OS, and the lack of modern multimedia capabilities are a real deal-breaker. In fact, the lack of multimedia capabilities are more of a weakness, than simply being free-as-in-beer is a strength; people are obviously willing to pay for an OS that works, but one that doesn't work out of the box (or works only after fiddling around with some shady instructions involving PLF mirrors) won't fly, even if it's free.
While people here on Slashdot may not regard having to manually install LAME, Xvid, Flash, and the Win32 codecs as a significant problem, it's one of the many reasons why you can't go out and buy a Dell pre-configured with Linux as a home computer. Even if there wasn't Microsoft trying to torpedo it before it gets going, I'm not sure customers would accept anything that didn't work right, right out of the box. Fluendo could, if they play their cards right, be a big benefit to the adoption of Linux.
...I'll tell him to be on the lookout for any coworkers who show up with new Porsches, Corvettes, etc., in the coming weeks. I think it would stick out just a little.
Exactly. Apple has shown in the past that they are capable of recompiling their OS for different architectures -- they did it from PPC and x86 -- why wouldn't they just have recompiled a stripped-down kernel for ARM? After all, they have all the source code, so if anyone could do it, it would be them.
This article just doesn't make any sense. I don't know if the Slashdot editors were looking for an anti-Apple article so as to appear to be giving "equal time," but this is pretty idiotic. There are better criticisms of Apple in general, and of the iPhone in particular, than this.
Isn't this how CSS was cracked eventually? The first hacks intercepted the keys from a player that stored them in a fixed location in memory, as this HD-DVD crack does, but later versions actually broke the encryption scheme without reliance on any existing code or players.
And wasn't the eventual mode of attack something related to weak initialization vectors, too? I might be confusing CSS with WEP here, but I thought that it was some poor implementation of IVs that led to a catastrophic reduction in the keyspace, allowing someone to easily brute-force the key.
Even if it was WEP and not CSS that was broken due to weak IVs, you'd think the AACS people would have learned.
Of course, given the inherent flaws in DRM, I'd have thought they've learned that they were playing Sisyphus by now, but it seems not.
This is getting OT, but if you want an abject example of why people start going for their gun closet every time things start to go unhinged, you don't need to look much further than New Orleans just after Katrina. The second you took away the police presence and most of the civil infrastructure, the place went to hell in a handbasket; next thing you know, we were hearing about reports of, in addition to the usual looting and arson, roving "rape gangs" wandering the streets.
This doesn't surprise me in the slightest. American culture is dichotomous; on the surface, we have a basically orderly society, one with a respect for other individuals, and the use of non-violent means of conflict resolution (taking each other to court, typically). However, there is a dark, latent underbelly to our society; one where violence is praised, 'rough justice' is celebrated, and you're entitled to whatever you can take, by hook or by crook, from anyone else. (Take a look at popular culture through the past century if you want examples.) Most of the time, the social structures of civil society keep a lid on the darker aspects, releasing them only when it's appropriate. But when those checks disappear -- when the infrastructure that normally acts as a disincentive to people's baser impulses falls apart -- things go downhill, quickly. Any major city in the U.S. is only about 24 hours away from looking like a deleted scene from Mad Max, if you take away the police and other control channels.
As I've never lived for any significant time in anywhere but the U.S., I can't make any comparisons to other cultures. It may be entirely possible that in other places, all the police could take a holiday and nobody would notice. (And in rural parts of America, this is probably the case.) However, I can absolutely assure you that would not be the case in urban or suburban regions where I've lived.
Well it is big news to business, I am guessing that the company that built it and the company that insured it are a little upset right now.
Why do you think that? They've all been paid; it's the government's (read: your tax dollars) loss, not the manufacturers. The government doesn't generally go to outside insurers for this sort of thing; when an expensive piece of equipment goes on the fritz, they -- by which I mean us -- pretty much just have to eat the cost.
If anything, the contractor is probably deciding on when it would be polite to just drop into conversation that yes, they still have all the plans for the satellite sitting around somewhere, and no, they're certainly not too busy to crank out another one, for an appropriate price.
I'm sure some of the engineers and designers that worked on the bird are probably disappointed that it'll never get to perform its function, whatever that was, but when you build spacecraft of any type for a living, you learn to deal with disappointment. It's one of the few things left in this world that still has some real risk to it. You can easily spend 3-5 years (or more) of your life building a satellite, only to have the launch vehicle go off-course during launch, and have the RSO blow all your hard work to smithereens. It comes with the territory.
Plus, it's not like the people that built it were ever going to know anything about it, if it did work. It would have just disappeared into the very black world of the NRO; I doubt they had much in the way of emotional attachment to it.
As an anti-satellite weapon. It would launch a special shell in space that would explode near the target satellite, covering it with sticky material and blinding it.
Who was their defense contractor on that idea? Lone Starr and a certain rotund guy with a tail named Barf?
The DirectTV people probably could come up with a way to only transmit programming to people who've paid for it, say via careful distribution of encryption keys or hardware, but they choose not to because it's easier to make a weak technological solution and then buy some laws that prevent reverse-engineering. This is a serious problem, and it's the beginning of a whole lot of bad laws we're burdened with now.
I have no problem if companies decide to try and encrypt their content. If they want to tie it down, lock it to hardware, whatever; go for it. But where I draw the line is when they started getting involved in the legislative process and making it illegal for people to break their chains, even when it was clear that people had the right to use the content in ways that the 'chains' prohibited.
If DirectTV is broadcasting its signal onto my property, then I ought to be able to set up a 1m dish and an LNB amplifier and a signal processor, and do whatever I want with the incoming electrons, as long as I don't take the results outside of my property (e.g. rebroadcasting them in a way that causes them to leave my property). That it's illegal for me to set up a dish and a few analog parts, and perform some mathematical transformations to the resulting signal, is absolutely ridiculous, and represents the height of governmental pandering to corporate interests.
Corporations should be free to attempt to restrict and encrypt their content as much as they want. But individuals should be allowed do whatever they want with the signals that they're given, particularly when they're being broadcast over the EM spectrum, which is inherently a public resource.
The anti-circumvention laws about satellite TV broadcasts in the 1980s are where we really started to go wrong with technology laws in this country, and it's a very direct path from there through to the DMCA. It's nothing but laziness: as long as its easier to get a law passed than to build robust systems, companies will always go to Congress with bags of cash in hand.
The point you're making is quite true; having more people in the global economy increases net production capacity, which results in greater output, which over time increases the standard of living for everyone. Obviously, you couldn't have the standard of living we enjoy now, if you were the only person on earth. This is all true.
Unfortunately it's mostly a red herring in the context of this discussion. In talking about legal vs illegal labor, the question isn't whether some laborers exist or not, but where they are and what market they're competing in. There's a difference between a discussion of the Economy of the world as a whole, and a discussion of a regional economy that exists within the larger world economy, but is decoupled from it in various ways.
So while the presence of a large pool of laborers may be a net good to the Economy as a whole (i.e., if they somehow didn't exist, the world would be poorer and everyone's quality of life would suffer somewhat), this doesn't say anything about whether it's beneficial to have those same individuals in a particular regional economy. California's economy might well be better off without those workers in it. There's a big difference. Discussing whether the regional economy of California, or even the U.S., would benefit from laws that made illegal immigration and employment harder doesn't say anything about whether the existence of those people is ultimately beneficial or harmful to the greater world economy, it's limited only to their location (i.e., "U.S. or Mexico" etc.).
So while everything that you (and the A.C.) were saying may be correct, it doesn't have much direct bearing on the situation.
Worst case, at some point American production falls so low that no one wants to buy anything from you any more... In that case we all get to experience a run on the dollar, and a global economic realignment. Who knows what the world will look like after that, but it won't look much like what we have now.
This seems to be the crux of it. In my opinion, we're at that first stage ("no one wants to buy anything") already, and we basically arrived there when we started seriously running up the trade deficit. Sure, there are still some big American exports (and probably always will be; we have a lot of exploitable natural resources, after all) but they're dwarfed by imports. The rest of the world is a whole lot less interested in American goods, than Americans are in foreign goods.
What you so politely term a "global economic realignment" is what concerns me. It seems to be the proverbial elephant in the room that nobody in the U.S. government wants to admit exists, much less actually discuss. (Perhaps because they all have their money invested in the stock of well-diversified multinationals?) I rather suspect that said 'realignment' could involve a lot of unsavory stuff on the domestic side (like riots, and expensive buildings being set on fire), when people figure out that their dollar-denominated bank accounts are suddenly worth very little on the international market. To be honest, that sounds a lot like the sort of thing that one would want to have a large pile of gold bullion, canned food, and ammunition stockpiled in the event of. (And just when I thought that Y2K stash would never pan out.)
More to the point, it sounds like something that should be avoided at all costs if it's even remotely possible. The major question then becomes: is it avoidable? Or have we gone too far down the path to possibly turn back now, if indeed we ever could, and this is not simply inevitable.
I'm not sure where I implied that I thought that an increase in productivity would result in an aggregate loss of jobs. In the long run, under ideal conditions, it doesn't; historically, we've done pretty well in this regard. So I think we probably agree with each other on this. I'm certainly not advocating Luddism, or any other rejection of increased technology because of the short-run job savings.
The point that I was trying to make is that you can't "compete" with a factory in an area with substantially lower costs (i.e. the Third World) by using technology and making your process more efficient. You can have the most efficient, technologically advanced factory in the world, but it's going to be a temporary advantage. Eventually, someone is going to take the same processes and the same technology, set it up in a low-cost area, and still undercut you. So the "American technology will save us" argument doesn't hold water. (Unless you're planning on having some sort of ridiculous export-control system to prevent foreigners from getting technology, but I think we can all agree that's a stupid and unworkable idea, so let's not say it too loudly around any politicians.)
A net increase in manufacturing efficiency, via new technology or new processes, is a Good Thing in the long run. I'm not debating that. It's just that these increased efficiencies still don't make up for the key problem, which is that it's tough to make a factory in a high-cost area competitive with a factory in a low-cost area. The only advantage the domestic (high cost) factory is going to have, is probably being closer to the end consumers and thus saving on transportation costs...but with high-value, high-technology manufactured goods, the cost of transportation is small enough to still have it work out for the foreign country's favor.
The question that I'm asking -- and I'm not attempting to pose a straw man here, I'm really quite interested and to date have never heard a convincing or reassuring answer -- is that the U.S. seems to have a standard of living which was built on a heavy manufacturing and exports base, as well as a virtual monopoly on the supply of hard currency. Given that we no longer have control of the currency market, and we're a net importer rather than exporter, I don't see how this is sustainable in the long term. I don't think, as a nation, that we really want to sink to the "global mean" after being used to some seriously above-average living for the past half-century, but we seem to be headed there a lot faster than the global mean standard of living is coming up to where we'd be comfortable meeting it.
Anything that puts U.S. firms in direct competition with firms in countries with much lower average standards/costs of living is going to be a losing game for the U.S. There's just no way to win at that. So it looks to me like we're in a bit of a dilemma, and perhaps the only way to win, is not to play.
I had no idea that this new "digital" cable went back to requiring those boxes. The idea that people would tolerate that was so absurd, that I didn't even think that it was a possiblity.
It's quite true. In fact, not only do people put up with boxes (and far bigger boxes than before; they're the size of VCR and put out heat like the bastard stepchild of a Pentium IV and a coffeepot), they pay extra for the pleasure. The reason is that these boxes are currently the only way to get "digital cable" (which is not to be confused with digital television, since the picture is still NTSC, not highdef, in most cases). The selling point of this is that you can have many more channels than before: hundreds of them, compared to the 90-100 with standard analog cable.
The point of this move by the FCC is basically to give people the capability of doing the "cable ready" thing, where you just run a length of coax from the wall to your TV, with digital cable. Unfortunately, it'll never be as easy as in the analog days; even though these new systems won't require a box, they'll still require the rental of a decrypter card, which I assume the cablecos will charge as much for as they charged for a box.
Well I think that's exactly the point.
"Sitting back and enjoying the show" would be watching it on DVD.
Going out and buying the HD version instead is like buying a microscope.
Using active tags and a highly directional antenna on the receiver, I suspect that you can probably "see" a tag from quite a distance away. Active tags transmit continuously, so they don't need a high-strength RF field to give them the juice to operate, like the passive tags inside SpeedPasses, etc.
Examples of active RFID already in use are the EZ Pass boxes used in cars in New England and the Northeast. They have toll gates in New Jersey that you drive through at full speed, and the receivers are up at normal Interstate bridge height (so trucks can go through them). And I doubt very much that they represent anything close to the state-of-the-art with respect to RFID. You can probably do some nice tradeoffs, like enhanced signal processing, when you're not receiving a bunch of tags every second.
Well, that was interesting. I wouldn't say informative, precisely, because I'm not sure what exactly I just read, but interesting.
Let me just get this straight. So someone decided to do this Wikileaks project. They recruit some other, ideologically-motivated ("solidarity!") folks to help. They claim to have a prototype that works, and distribute a leaked document from Somalia of unknown provenance. They create several mailing lists. Lots of cloak-and-dagger stuff, people playing with PGP, etc., ensues. The guy from Cryptome is asked to be the holder of the wikileaks.org domain.
Eventually they decide to try and raise $5M USD from somewhere. Cryptome guy says they're crazy, that everyone will think it's a scam, or that they're a front for the CIA. Wikileaks guys basically say "noted," and move on. Cryptome guy decides it's definitely a scam, pulls out, and publishes the emails, only redacted to remove emails and other identifying information.
Is that basically it?
Well, I would think that the idea is that this place is a repository for leaked primary-source information, and not one for conjecture. If they're smart, they won't allow text-editing like Wikipedia, but will be more like Wikimedia Commons, allowing people to upload files and comment on them, rather than write articles.
If you could produce some secret NASA documents on the fake moon landing, and scan them in, then this would be the place you'd want to share them. Of course, it would also be the place to share the fake moon-landing documents you just produced in Microsoft Word, printed out, and scanned in, but the reliability of documents is really for the viewer to decide.
What we really need is not another "wiki" for people to re-edit history as they see fit, but a un-censorable file repository and CMS, where people can post files and then other people can download them, without restrictions on the content.
Ok smart guy, lets take that argument to its logical conclusion... we eliminate everyone in the world, except you. No one is competing with you for a job. Are you better off or worse off?
That's not a "logical conclusion," it's a very poor reductio ad absurdum. It doesn't even make sense. Try again.
You're creating a straw man. I could just as easily say: Imagine for a second you have a machine that produces plastic doll parts. It reduces the assembly costs by 50%, but that the machine costs $500,000 to set up and get running. Unfortunately, you make no sales, because even though your machine would allow a U.S. factory to produce plastic dolls competitively with an overseas sweatshop, nobody is going to invest the capital when they can just offshore. The point being that when you allow overseas manufacturers, located in places with substantially lower cost-of- and standards-of-living, there's no reason for domestic firms to even attempt to make themselves competitive.
But anyway, it's just a straw man either way. The fundamental question is "why the hell are we playing this game in the first place?" We know we're going to lose. You can't reasonably expect a factory in a country with things like unions and OSHA and a 40-hour workweek to compete with a country that doesn't. It's not a race, or even "competition." We know who's going to win that race. And it only gets worse: even if, like in my silly example above, the American company does implement some labor-saving manufacturing technology that drops its costs by half, the overseas company can easily do the same thing -- probably more easily, since there's no laws that give them issues when they want to fire half their employees -- and still undercut the domestic firm.
Given that a domestic firm can't possibly compete for any length of time with the foreign one, I think the only solution that seems sustainable is to either block imports by the foreign firm, or apply a tariff to them that represents some metric of the difference in prevailing wages and worker benefits between that country and ours. As a result, if there is a demand in the U.S. for Barbie dolls, the price will go up until it encompasses the true cost of producing them here in the U.S. I'm not a big fan of this path, but I don't really see a better way that seems sustainable for the U.S. over the long term.
I think you are off on a factor of 2 with the price; the lowest I can find is $85 with most places around $100.
But a neat box nonetheless. I suspect that it's probably worth the cost even if you have an old PC kicking around, just because of the reduced power consumption over the system's lifespan.
Ubuntu is really not the solution someone like the GP was looking for. It's a nice general-purpose server distro, but it's certainly not plug and play. And with Ubuntu's server installation, you're not going to be clicking any buttons, because by default there's no GUI.
I think that the dedicated home-server distros like Smoothwall or maybe Coraid's NAS distro would be more what he's looking for. They're not much harder to set up than a typical broadband router -- you just install from a CD and then do your configuration from a web page -- but they provide a lot of functionality, because they run on commodity PC hardware and run Linux (or BSD, depending).
I think the point the GP is making, and it's a good one, is that not everyone wants something that requires any level of configuration. People want things that are plug and play. Luckily, I think the market has seen this and is producing products that try to fill it: VMWare's list of virtual appliances lists dozens of possible candidates.
To be frank, I think that virtual appliances are the future of Linux and its related (*NIX) OSes, as it goes more and more mainstream. Average users don't want to configure things, which is why we've seen a tendency towards pre-rolled desktop distros and LiveCDs. As people's home networks become more substantial, I think home servers are going to be the same way. The geeks and early adopters will configure their own gear, but average folks want something that can shove in an old PC's disk drive and set up once, then never think about again.
How do you become a team lead when you can't get any experience being on the team?
:)
Well that's easy: you go to business school and get an MBA.
On a more serious note, I don't think most companies have really thought much about where they're going to get their "team leads" once they've exhausted the supply of experienced people in the U.S., the ones who got trained before so many entry-level jobs went overseas. I think the idea is that they'll take some Indian guy, get him an H1-B, ship him over here and teach him the management stuff.
But your point is a really good one. It should worry us when the entry-level jobs start going overseas, because that's where the people who do the higher-level jobs come from. When all the entry-level jobs are gone, then the companies are going to start complaining that there aren't enough experienced people here in the States, and that they need more work visas. Thus, you outsource the whole company from the bottom up, and when something can't be outsourced, you bring in people on visas, because they're the only ones with the experience to do it anymore.
So your solution depends on getting about a billion Chinese peasants and another billion Indians into single-family houses, cars, TVs, computers, Internet, etc. -- basically, whatever we'd desire as a middle-class existence here in the U.S. -- before the U.S. loses its edge and achieves equilibrium with the rest of the world.
Forgive me if I think that's a little bit of a stretch. It's a laudable goal, but just one I don't see any chance of happening. It seems like it's going to take the rest of the world a lot longer to reach the current quality of life in the U.S., than it's going to take the U.S. to collapse and fall to theirs, if the current situation continues unmodified.
Alternately, they're there to manage teams of outsourced programmers. Most case studies of outsouring that I've read, have showed far higher success rates when someone from the "home office" goes and works with the execution team on-site for the duration of the project as a liaison. Tele-work only goes so far; if you're going to spend a few million bucks on software development, it's worth it to send somebody to be your "boots on the ground" to deal with the problems that naturally come up, and give your organization a face.
I don't know anyone who's actually moved from the U.S. to India, to work as an hourly-wage programmer. But I do know people who have worked or relocated there for a while, to act as team leads for companies that are doing outsourcing work. There's a substantial difference between those two functions: the latter basically only exist because the work is being outsourced from a company on the other side of the globe.
Except how many of those pickers are U.S. Citizens, and how many are actually Mexicans, living in the U.S. illegally?
Maybe there's a reason why they only get paid $0.70 per box: that's all they need to pay to get the workers. If you eliminated the vast supply of cheap, illegal labor, you might create a labor shortage and drive wages up. But when you've got people willing to work for peanuts, that's what the jobs are going to pay.
This cost isn't included in most (at least not that I've seen, anyway) analyses of illegal labor, because it's hard to quantify. The presence of a vast cheap-labor pool prevents wages from increasing, and also prevents mechanized technology from being brought to bear on problems. There's a reason that a mechanical cotton-picker wasn't invented until long after the South's Great Migration: when you had slaves, and later sharecroppers, there was no impetus to spend the capital necessary to mechanize.