This is not the case. The media key block on the HD discs contains the media key, encrypted with several hundred device keys. There's not nearly enough room in the key block to have an individual key for each player produced, it's just enough for each model, or perhaps each hardware revision / production run of each model.
There are a finite number of keys on each disc. The way keys are "revoked" is by simply not using that key on any new disc pressings. A disc made (prior to) today, on which the key block contains a compromised key, have been well and truly cracked.
Bad news for most people who would like to marginalize/otherwise dismiss the free culture argument: the economic basis for the contention that "information wants to be free" is rock solid. Scientific. To escape it you have to resort to name-calling etc., as here.
Moreover, there is an information-theory perspective as well, involving the inherent nonconservative nature of information in its most basic forms. Digitization brings "information" closer to that basic form, by detaching it more thoroughly from physical media (books, tapes, etc.) and allows its basic attributes to come forward.
There's nothing you can do to put that genie back in the bottle.
That 100% inception rate is a hell of an exaggeration; last time I looked at the FDA statistics, only about 80% of "average" couples (so, we assume they have sex at the average American frequency of around 2-3 times a week) get pregnant in a year of having sex, without any birth control at all. The per-encounter impregnation rate is actually lower than you'd think...it just seems to always occur to people when they don't want it to.
Because it's idiotic. It's like Best Buy packaging a blasting cap and several ounces of plastic explosive with every DVD player, and triggering them with the sensor that normally beeps when you walk out the door. You shoplift, we blow your legs off! Great system, eh?
There's a reason why that's both illegal, and would get them sued in civil court -- it's ridiculous. People don't expect products to explode and kill them, nor do they expect software that performs one function, to magically transform itself into a virus and wipe out their data.
This isn't even vigilantism, it's just booby-trapping at its worst.
They're not the university with the most file sharers...they're the university with the most file sharers WHO GOT CAUGHT. The smart thing to do is ensure that most file sharing is within the university, not with outside sources, to minimize exposure to the ??AA. If you're getting caught, you're doing it wrong.
I think that the key here is that their network is conducive, basically, to getting caught.
They don't give any details in the PR puff-piece that's linked from the Slashdot blurb, but it sounds like they must be issuing every client on the network its own externally-addressable IP address. While this is kinda cool, from the perspective of being able to run your own server or something, it also makes it exceptionally easy for the RIAA to home in on you. At other places, where individual PCs are hidden behind NAT, it's more difficult to pick out a particular client and send a subpoena / violation order. Having a single externally-facing IP per user pretty much eliminates their plausible deniability.
NATed networks have a more defined 'edge,' between what's the Public Internet and what's the internal network. I generally applaud Ohio U. for having an open network, because in most cases it's a Good Thing, however, it means people have to be more careful when they're setting up a file-swapping network, because it's more likely that their 'private' network is going to be accessible by, and/or linked to, the outside world, than it would be if they were on a private subnet with non-routable IPs and firewalls that were set to block all incoming connections.
Basically, they're having a regular Woodstock of file sharing, while everyone else is smoking joints in closed rooms with the curtains drawn. The openness may be fun, but it also makes it a whole lot easier for the Man to notice and walk right in.
IBM has 300,000 employees. Sun has 40,000. Microsoft has 71,000.
If those companies all suddenly went under, that would be ~411,000 people out of work, including a large number of developers and maintainers of critical OSS projects. That's a whole lot of people who would suddenly need to turn their attention from their side-projects and onto more crucial issues, like eating. Many of those people would probably be forced to leave the tech sector to find work, and if you're not doing something computer-related in your 9-to-5, it's a lot more difficult to stay current in the field, and keep your level of interest up. A whole lot of talent would just move on to other, non-IT things.
It would probably cause a stock-selling panic that could bankrupt other tech companies. (Hell, IBM and MSFT are basically blue chips; if they collapsed, the whole economy would catch a cold.) The resulting salary depression would make IT-related occupations a basically impossible way to make a living, and drive generations of future students away from the field. (I mean, when programming pays worse than pizza delivery, why spend $50k in school?) Not to mention the fact that IBM in particular is one of the few companies doing anything akin to basic research any more. Who's going to keep doing that, Dell? I don't think so.
Saying that those three companies could annihilate each other without any fallout or collateral damage is ridiculous.
Sure, the lights probably wouldn't go out in Manhattan, but it would be the worst thing to happen to the high-tech industry since the dot-com bubble burst, and it would probably even dwarf that.
If the bloated corporations abusing intellectual property law started suing each other into bankrupcy, the downside would be... what, exactly?
Unemployment, for me personally, and probably a whole lot of other people.
Those big corporations fund a lot of other software development -- directly, in the case of IBM and Sun and some others, but indirectly in the case of tons of other companies, just because they provide a day job for people who otherwise would be spending 15 hours a day delivering pizzas or waiting tables to pay the bills.
Your attitude is sorta like a guy in Guam saying "hey, if the USA and the USSR wipe themselves out tomorrow, where's the downside?" Well, the downside is that the world just ended.
So who gets the best actor Oscar? The actor or the CGI staff?
If I were the one running the awards show, there wouldn't be a "Best Actor" Oscar. There would just be a "Best Picture" (and "Best [Fill in Category Here] Picture" e.g., "Best Drama"). Let the Screen Actors Guild make up awards for particular actors, if they really want to, based on whatever technical criteria they want to use to define "good acting." Likewise, the Sound Engineers' professional association can give out awards for best recording and editing. Hell, the food service people can give out awards for best catering or craft services table.
But the really big awards would be based on the overall quality of the finished product -- the movie -- and not attempt to break it down into particular components. Obviously, the notability of particular people is going to make the movie's award more of a personal honor than others: the lead actor who was in a Best Picture nominated movie is going to benefit more than the 2nd Electrician's Assistant. But they'd both be able to put it on their resume, for whatever it's worth.
Movies themselves are inherently all in competition, and trying to do the same thing -- capture mindshare (and thus revenue, fame, and fortune) by being compelling or otherwise interesting. That's the criteria they should be judged by. The technical aspects of how they achieve this (good writing, acting, publicity, music, karma, whatever) are secondary, and would be better if left to specific groups who are actually interested in the gritty details as a process in themselves (presumably so they can improve it). To the rest of us, the process doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether the next blockbuster is made on a billion-dollar soundstage, or is spat out of the belly of a giant magic machine; either it's a good film or it's not. That's what the Oscars should be all about.
I'm not disagreeing (or even arguing with you) in the slightest... I'm not really qualified to comment. My point was more that people at the "low end of the totem pole" can really make your life as a mid-level cube monkey a living hell, if you abuse them. At a place I used to work, I knew a guy who was particularly abrasive to employees he perceived to be his 'subordinates,' particularly the office staff. The strangest things used to happen to him -- his conference room reservations always got "lost," his mail got delivered late or mangled, the lights in his cubicle were permanently out, his trash didn't get emptied, etc. -- I guess he just had bad luck. Or something.
Every time I've switched companies, the two groups of people I've always tried to make sure I was on good terms with, were the guys in the mail room, and the secretarial and physical plant staff. The number of times that it's paid off, in terms of making some bureaucratic nightmare just disappear, or work out just that much easier, I can't even tell you. It's the difference between, if I bring down a package that needs to go out in today's mail at 3:02PM, getting told "I'm sorry, you've missed it for the day," and "Sure, I can toss that in for you." The first isn't exactly outright sabotage, but it's what some other people I know would probably get down there.
If I was the guy who had to tell the secretaries that they couldn't bring iPods into work anymore, I'd probably start working from home.
Somewhere around I have an Apple 20MB hard drive that is getting on 15 years old. Sure, it hasn't seen a lot of usage recently, but I still fire it up every once in a while. (It makes the greatest turbine-like startup sound; seriously, it's like a 747.) Connects to the floppy disk controller. Has its own power supply.
I'm sure there are people around with even older, still-working-fine gear. A while back, I saw some DEC disk packs for the early removable-platter hard drives selling on eBay, as pulls-from-working equipment. I'm not sure what exactly was going through the minds of the designers when they were building stuff, a decade or two ago, but they just seemed to not be planning for obsolescence in the same way that the people churning out today's disposable gear are. (Although the sample is clearly biased: looking at the 20-year-old gear from 1986 that's still around today might make you think that everything then was bulletproof, but in reality all the crappy stuff is already 30 feet down in some landfill somewhere.)
I suspect in 20 years, people will look back at 2006 gear as the height of reliability, just because it'll only be the really exceptionally well-built pieces of gear that will still be around. The Deathstars and other crap drives that failed will long be forgotten.
On the other hand, you could get a cheap drive controller, and do software RAID, using OSS tools; the setup might be more complex than hardware RAID, but there shouldn't be any issues with recovering your data later due to the format it's written in.
I agree though, that for most people, some sort of "userland RAID" where the disks are just mounted as regular volumes to the filesystem, and then you just write the data twice, is probably the best bet. There's no format problems, and you'll always be able to pull a drive out, stick it in another machine, and get at your data.
Give me a band that is willing to perform live, unplugged, and I'll respect them. Otherwise all the credit goes to the behind-the-scenes guys that make them not suck.
Sure -- and the credit, rightly, should go to the behind-the-scenes people, if they're the one making the sound. I'm totally with you there. But I don't listen to "unplugged" albums, because to me it's irrelevant. Why do I care if they can play well or not? If I wanted to hear acoustic music, I'd listen to a well-mastered acoustic album, not to a rock group playing with their amps turned off. Unplugged albums seem interesting from a technical and documentary sense -- it would be interesting to a music student, perhaps, to go back and listen to some notable performers and see what they sounded like before the mastering, but I'm not a music student. The only thing I care about is the end product, because that's the only thing I'm qualified to judge. I can't tell a good guitarist from a bad guitarist, but I can tell what I like to listen to.
The musicians' musical talent (or lack thereof) is only interesting insofar as it's the first step in a chain which may or may not result in good music coming out of my stereo. The problem as I see it with the current situation, is that it doesn't recognize the artistry of the people who work "behind the scenes" on all the intermediate steps that happen after the musician does something that results in noise, but before it hits your ear.
Perhaps the problem is that we haven't completely separated "music" in the recorded-sound sense, from the actual act and craft of playing a traditional musical instrument in person. Although I'd say that we're probably edging on semantics, what I care about is less "listening to someone demonstrate their instrument-playing skills" than the overall experience of "listening to a pleasant sound recording." If that sound recording starts off as variations in the pressure of the air in the general vicinity of somebody's mouth, that's well and good, but it could just as easily (and acceptably, to me) begin as some ones-and-zeros in a computer processor somewhere. I don't even care if it comes from a person, or if a person is involved anywhere. (Although I've yet to hear any completely algorithmic music that sounded good. I suspect that it will remain outside the domain of mechanization for a while, at least.)
I can understand that traditional musicians might not like this point of view, because they've invested a lot of time in learning a particular instrument, and probably don't want to lose their top billing on the CD cover to a guy whose 'instrument' is a Pro Tools workstation. But the credit should follow who-ever's skills are really adding the most to the finished products. There were times in the past when the piano or the electric guitar weren't considered polite or acceptable medium for artistic expression, either.
I've worked in corporate R&D labs with relatively high security that still provided wireless access on the grounds of the lab. This is a security risk, perhaps, but one that was mitigated to an extent deemed acceptable, given the value it provided. Another company I worked for, with far less to worry about from a data protection perspective, denied our numerous requests for wireless access on grounds of "security". In other words, they were too incompetent to mitigate the risk involved to provide a valuable service to us.
Sometimes it's also funding. I know of a place where the IT department used "security" as a catchall refusal for things they couldn't afford to implement, but didn't want to admit they were incapable of. For example, if an executive asks for wireless, they get told that they can't do it, because of the security risks. The executive grumbles, walks off. If they had said the real reason -- because deploying wireless might have cost a lot -- then it would have been an invitation for the executive to perform the following comparison: [Size of IT Dept Annual Budget] vs [Cost of Wireless Internet]... assuming that the former is larger in absolute terms than the latter, and neglecting all other IT dept responsibilities, there would have been a demand that wireless be rolled out yesterday (probably with the addendum "isn't that what we give you all that goddamn money for?").
But telling someone that you can't do it because of vague 'security concerns' sounds a lot better, and invites a lot less inquiry, than 'because we're spending our money elsewhere already, and we don't want to spend it on your pet project.'
If the receptionist is assumed to be untrustworthy, then they could just as easily install a real hardware keylogger in between the PC and the keyboard. (And that would be a lot easier to get than an iPod-disguised keylogger.)
I'm not saying that there aren't situations where barring anything that could carry data away is appropriate. It's just that IT types seem to hone in on the "security breaches" that they can shore up, to the greatest inconvenience of users, while ignoring glaring holes elsewhere. If you're going to tell the secretary that she can't charge her iPod from the USB port because of the risk of keylogging, I hope that the keyboard's PS/2 connector is superglued in, or the entire chassis is encased in a locked steel container. Otherwise you're ignoring an obvious avenue of attack (like these), but going after a highly unlikely one, even though the treatment for the unlikely one annoys the user more.
Most IT departments have so many security problems and vulnerabilities, it's hard to even know where to start. But rather than working through them in a rational way, they seem to begin with the premise that "anything that annoys the users in the name of security must be good." (Probably not their fault; it's probably an attempt to placate a PHB somewhere by making the security really obvious...)
It's ultimately a glass-houses issue. Before overt, draconian security measures are put in place, everything else ought to be locked up already. Otherwise, it just makes the IT department look like they're power-tripping, regardless of the real motivation. And in the corporate world, it's not good to make everyone else hate you. Particularly the secretaries.
I imagine people who could paint very realistic paintings were quite upset when cameras were invented. No one enjoys having one's skills made obsolete.
Indeed they were, and in the early 20th century, a combination of photography and a host of other mechanical, mass-productive technologies, prompted a critical rethinking of what "art" was.
The seminal work in this line of thinking, IMO, was by a guy named Walter Benjamin, and it's called The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. It's not exactly a light read, but I think anyone with an interest in modern digital media or art ought to try to muddle through it (or an analysis of it), because some of the points he makes are still quite salient. (Actually, I'd go further, and say that Benjamin's words are more important now, with digital reproduction, than they were in the 1930s when he wrote them, when the only reproductive methods available were analog and inherently lossy, more akin to making a new but very similar work, than to actually duplicating the existing one, so that there are two absolutely identical new artworks in existence.)
Basically, he argues that mechanical reproduction allows you to remove art from its real-world context. (Benjamin calls the context, and other stuff that is lost when a piece of art is reproduced, its "aura.")
The shooting of a film, especially of a sound film, affords a spectacle unimaginable anywhere at any time before this. It presents a process in which it is impossible to assign to a spectator a viewpoint which would exclude from the actual scene such extraneous accessories as camera equipment, lighting machinery, staff assistants, etc. - unless his eye were on a line parallel with the lens. This circumstance, more than any other, renders superficial and insignificant any possible similarity between a scene in the studio and one on the stage. In the theater one is well aware of the place from which the play cannot immediately be detected as illusionary. There is no such place for the movie scene that is being shot. Its illusionary nature is that of the second degree, the result of cutting. That is to say, in the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice...The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.
Benjamin's point, in my uneducated opinion, seems to be that although modern forms of art get further and further away from objective "reality" (by separating the art from its context and breaking the aura), it allows for new possibilities that older art wasn't as conducive to. Films allowed for the shared experience by many people of the same thing, at virtually the same time, in a way that theater couldn't do (if I go to a play, even if you go to the 'same' play the next night, you will not have seen the same thing that I saw; your experience will be subtly different; furthermore, it's possible to do things in a film that cannot be done on stage) -- this is an opportunity that skilled artists have been able to take advantage of. Similarly, 21st century post-digital art, which is entirely reproducible, will allow even more.
Case in point: I'm sure Tom Cruise, Ben Afflec, etc, would be perfectly capable of being garbage men. But how many garbage men would be able to do their jobs? Although some refuse to recognize it, there are quite a few fairly complex skills actors have to master to be good. This is where the 'honesty' thing comes in. Acting is, essentially, dishonest; but it's the honesty of the performance that actors are worried about. They are paid to act, and if a computer can do half of the acting for them, then what are they supposed to do??
If the garbage man was named "Tom Cruise," any one you wanted. What those 'big name' actors have is brand power. They're marketing. In terms of skills, you can see better acting in most community theaters in any major U.S. city. (Okay, so it's not exactly garbagemen, but the skills aren't that uncommon.) But those people aren't worth anything, because nobody knows who they are, thus a movie they were in wouldn't be a guaranteed blockbuster like Cruise and Affleck. Because of the very high risk to reward ratio of acting as a career, there are doubtless lots of people in more secure lines of work, who would be better actors than those currently doing it, but who don't want to run the risk that committing to it (which is required to have a shot, basically) would involve. Not everyone who has a set of skills necessarily wants to use them.
The reason big stars get paid so much, is because they're worth even more to the movie producers. They earn their salaries, usually, in the first weekend that a movie opens; I could think of dozens of films that were utter crap, but generated wads of cash for some studio, by virtue of "star power." Thus, those people have a big market value, and assuming they can negotiate well, they get pretty close to what they're worth.
This situation isn't anything new; acting hasn't been a meritocracy of any sort in decades, if indeed it ever was. There's certainly a minimum skill level that you need to have in order to be able to do the job, but it's not that high. Luck plays a much bigger role, plus personality, people skills, and of course, connections. Once you get name recognition, it's a self-perpetuating gig; assuming you don't screw it up (by getting arrested or otherwise tarnishing your own image).
People seem to have this obsession over "authenticity," as if it matters apart from the quality of the output that they actually witness. I've seen it a lot in music, too, where it's even more ridiculous.
The mantra of an old sound engineer I used to know seem appropriate: "If it sounds good, it is good."
The 'process' is only important to other people engaged in the Art, and to yourself if you're the artist, so you know what you did right (if the output is good), or wrong (if it's crap). The audience doesn't, and shouldn't, really care. Does it matter what kind of microphone the engineer used on the kick drum, if what's on the tape sounds good? Of course not. Hell, it doesn't matter if there was a kick drum. Maybe it was just a drum machine, or a sampled sound. The only important thing is the finished composition. If it sounds good, then the process worked; if it sounds like crap, then it doesn't matter how much effort went into it, it's still crap. Likewise, it shouldn't matter whether the vocalist really hit that note, or whether they were pushed with an auto-tuner. Does the ultimate effect work? That's the real question.
Likewise, I don't particularly care whether Jennifer Connelly's tears were real or not, because I don't care whether she can actually act or not. I only care whether it appears that she can act, insofar as she does a good job in the role, and the movie is good. If the movie is good, then the process was good; if the movie sucked, I don't care whether she was a good actress or not, I still will have wasted $9.50 and two hours of my life.
The only reason why we ought to care, or pay any attention at all, to where the "quality" comes from, is so we can award credit and compensation correctly. When I listen to a song, I don't give a damn whether the musicians "can actually play," so long as what's coming out of my speakers sounds pleasant. It's completely academic to me whether that 'pleasantness' was produced by the musician on the guitar, or by the guy at the mastering house in postproduction. However, I'd prefer, if the actual artistry and skill that makes the music nice to listen to, occurs at the mixing board rather than at the guitar, that the guy at the mixing console get his name listed at the top of the CD's label (if only so I can see what else he did and find it easily).
Modern entertainment-art is not a product of any one person; it's almost always collaborative. A movie is made not just by the actors, but by the actors, writers, director, editors... everyone all the way down to the gaffers and lighting people. It's silly to try and pick out what's a product of the actor him- or herself; the important thing is the quality and enjoyability of the finished product. If it looks good, it is good. Nothing else matters.
You could just as easily establish the brand value with a (hypothetical) CGI actor, as you could with a real person. Heck, they do it with cartoon characters and puppets right now. Why have they bothered to make three Toy Story pictures, instead of just stopping after #1 and making two different movies? It's because those characters -- even though they're nothing but some ray-traced computer models and voice-overs -- have established the same type of brand value that flesh-and-blood actors have. Maybe not Tom Cruise levels of brand value, but hey, at least Buzz Lightyear isn't ever going to freak out and join the Scientologists on you.
Cards are a rather flawed system, particularly when not in person. Not to mention how unfriendly credit cards are to customers. It's wonderful to have cash now, but not worth the interest charges. Past that, their unfriendly to merchants, but due to the "convenience" of cards, they're all but required.
Cards are effectively required because of one thing: ATM surcharges.
Customers use credit cards, and their kin, debit cards, because it's obnoxious and impractical to use cash anymore. If you get your paycheck direct-deposited into a checking account, it's much easier to pay with plastic (and then either write a single check at the end of the month, or have it debited electronically) than it is to go to the ATM, withdraw cash, pay with cash, and then deal with the resultant change. Plus, it's difficult to find an ATM that doesn't charge you a fee for getting cash.
To a consumer, using cash costs money -- if you withdraw in $50 increments, it could be as much as 4-6% ($2 to $3 per ATM transaction) -- while using a debit or credit card is free.
If it weren't for ATM fees, I'd probably still use cash more often. But given that my bank doesn't have any local branches, and it's a pain to constantly worry about where the nearest fee-free ATM is, it's easier just to use plastic for everything. There are more merchants around who accept credit cards, than there are fee-free ATMs.
Some friends of mine still tell a story from pre-internet days: an obviously fraudulent order was reported to the police, who actually took action(!) Two police officers dressed as couriers delivered a fake parcel and nicked the thief when he signed for it.
This is what really gets me about internet/mail-order fraud. The risks would be huge if the police gave a shit, since frequently it is blatantly obvious, and the thief has given the place and time he's going to receive the goods, and all that has to be done is turn up and put cuffs on him. No-one cares though.
They start to care when the amount of money exceeds trivial amounts, though. Not too long ago, I spent some time living in a house with a few guys (*cough* Craigslist *cough*). One of the other people in the house was actively engaged, I suspected, in some type of shady dealing. Needless to say, I moved out in a heck of a hurry. As it all came out later, this not-too-bright fellow thought he had discovered the perfect scheme: he was copying credit card numbers down at work, and then using them to buy things online, which he had shipped to various empty houses, and then he'd go and pick the stuff up later, and pawn or fence it on eBay. (And this is pretty much all I know about it; I don't quite get how he was getting the billing zip codes, which are usually required, or anything else.)
He got away with it for quite a while, too -- somewhere around six months, maybe more -- probably because he never used the same card more than once, never bought stuff from the same online store, and never charged more than $100 or so per card. But eventually the credit card companies must have caught on, and run all the accounts that had disputed charges through some sort of filter, and figured out that the common thread was the retail establishment where he worked. One day, according to the story I heard, they just walked in and arrested him. They had a stack of photos of him picking up packages from other people's houses, plus transaction details from the various merchants with the stolen CC numbers and the shipping addresses.
So both the credit card companies and the police have some level of interest in going after people engaged in fraudulent activity, but the bar seems to be pretty high. I've no idea how much money had to go missing before someone at one of the CC companies (or an automated program of some sort) decided to take a closer look and see what the common thread was, but it must have been in the thousands of dollars, perhaps tens of thousands.
In this case, I don't see how the merchants would have ever caught on; to all the places where things were ordered, it looked just like a regular transaction. It was only at the CC back offices, where they had the ability to cross-reference all the suspect accounts and see that they had all visited the same store within the past 24-48 hours (or whatever, I assume this is how they caught on), that they had the capability of doing anything. To push the financial burden out to the merchants, probably would have meant that he could have gotten away even longer.
In fact, to people with a brain,... Why do we need more government intervention?
Because most people are idiots?
In my state, the public-school system is funded, in large part, by a tax on people who are bad at math. It works startlingly well, even though in a rational world, it wouldn't draw in a cent.
A system that assumed that people will do the rational, productive (heck, even the self-interested) thing in the long term, is probably doomed to failure. People aren't rational, and frankly, given the choice between thinking and not thinking, they seem to overwhelmingly choose the latter.
All joking aside, the radio-interference issue is a non-trivial one to many people (including myself) who are concerned about mass producing a whole lot of anything that's going to possibly mess up the shortwave or HF radio bands. Luckily, most CFLs don't seem to be too bad. There are a lot of anecdotal reports of ham radio operators using them alongside HF radios without problems, and the manufacturers themselves seem to be cognizant of the problem.
In case anyone is interested in specific figures, there is a chart of RFI versus frequency from a typical CFL ballast here (go to the very end of the document for the graph).
Slashdot Mirror
Each individual PS3 unit has a different key.
This is not the case. The media key block on the HD discs contains the media key, encrypted with several hundred device keys. There's not nearly enough room in the key block to have an individual key for each player produced, it's just enough for each model, or perhaps each hardware revision / production run of each model.
There are a finite number of keys on each disc. The way keys are "revoked" is by simply not using that key on any new disc pressings. A disc made (prior to) today, on which the key block contains a compromised key, have been well and truly cracked.
Bad news for most people who would like to marginalize/otherwise dismiss the free culture argument: the economic basis for the contention that "information wants to be free" is rock solid. Scientific. To escape it you have to resort to name-calling etc., as here.
Moreover, there is an information-theory perspective as well, involving the inherent nonconservative nature of information in its most basic forms. Digitization brings "information" closer to that basic form, by detaching it more thoroughly from physical media (books, tapes, etc.) and allows its basic attributes to come forward.
There's nothing you can do to put that genie back in the bottle.
That 100% inception rate is a hell of an exaggeration; last time I looked at the FDA statistics, only about 80% of "average" couples (so, we assume they have sex at the average American frequency of around 2-3 times a week) get pregnant in a year of having sex, without any birth control at all. The per-encounter impregnation rate is actually lower than you'd think...it just seems to always occur to people when they don't want it to.
Because it's idiotic. It's like Best Buy packaging a blasting cap and several ounces of plastic explosive with every DVD player, and triggering them with the sensor that normally beeps when you walk out the door. You shoplift, we blow your legs off! Great system, eh?
There's a reason why that's both illegal, and would get them sued in civil court -- it's ridiculous. People don't expect products to explode and kill them, nor do they expect software that performs one function, to magically transform itself into a virus and wipe out their data.
This isn't even vigilantism, it's just booby-trapping at its worst.
They're not the university with the most file sharers...they're the university with the most file sharers WHO GOT CAUGHT. The smart thing to do is ensure that most file sharing is within the university, not with outside sources, to minimize exposure to the ??AA. If you're getting caught, you're doing it wrong.
I think that the key here is that their network is conducive, basically, to getting caught.
They don't give any details in the PR puff-piece that's linked from the Slashdot blurb, but it sounds like they must be issuing every client on the network its own externally-addressable IP address. While this is kinda cool, from the perspective of being able to run your own server or something, it also makes it exceptionally easy for the RIAA to home in on you. At other places, where individual PCs are hidden behind NAT, it's more difficult to pick out a particular client and send a subpoena / violation order. Having a single externally-facing IP per user pretty much eliminates their plausible deniability.
NATed networks have a more defined 'edge,' between what's the Public Internet and what's the internal network. I generally applaud Ohio U. for having an open network, because in most cases it's a Good Thing, however, it means people have to be more careful when they're setting up a file-swapping network, because it's more likely that their 'private' network is going to be accessible by, and/or linked to, the outside world, than it would be if they were on a private subnet with non-routable IPs and firewalls that were set to block all incoming connections.
Basically, they're having a regular Woodstock of file sharing, while everyone else is smoking joints in closed rooms with the curtains drawn. The openness may be fun, but it also makes it a whole lot easier for the Man to notice and walk right in.
...Like by, say, invading a predominantly Arab country?
IBM has 300,000 employees. Sun has 40,000. Microsoft has 71,000.
If those companies all suddenly went under, that would be ~411,000 people out of work, including a large number of developers and maintainers of critical OSS projects. That's a whole lot of people who would suddenly need to turn their attention from their side-projects and onto more crucial issues, like eating. Many of those people would probably be forced to leave the tech sector to find work, and if you're not doing something computer-related in your 9-to-5, it's a lot more difficult to stay current in the field, and keep your level of interest up. A whole lot of talent would just move on to other, non-IT things.
It would probably cause a stock-selling panic that could bankrupt other tech companies. (Hell, IBM and MSFT are basically blue chips; if they collapsed, the whole economy would catch a cold.) The resulting salary depression would make IT-related occupations a basically impossible way to make a living, and drive generations of future students away from the field. (I mean, when programming pays worse than pizza delivery, why spend $50k in school?) Not to mention the fact that IBM in particular is one of the few companies doing anything akin to basic research any more. Who's going to keep doing that, Dell? I don't think so.
Saying that those three companies could annihilate each other without any fallout or collateral damage is ridiculous.
Sure, the lights probably wouldn't go out in Manhattan, but it would be the worst thing to happen to the high-tech industry since the dot-com bubble burst, and it would probably even dwarf that.
If the bloated corporations abusing intellectual property law started suing each other into bankrupcy, the downside would be... what, exactly?
Unemployment, for me personally, and probably a whole lot of other people.
Those big corporations fund a lot of other software development -- directly, in the case of IBM and Sun and some others, but indirectly in the case of tons of other companies, just because they provide a day job for people who otherwise would be spending 15 hours a day delivering pizzas or waiting tables to pay the bills.
Your attitude is sorta like a guy in Guam saying "hey, if the USA and the USSR wipe themselves out tomorrow, where's the downside?" Well, the downside is that the world just ended.
So who gets the best actor Oscar? The actor or the CGI staff?
If I were the one running the awards show, there wouldn't be a "Best Actor" Oscar. There would just be a "Best Picture" (and "Best [Fill in Category Here] Picture" e.g., "Best Drama"). Let the Screen Actors Guild make up awards for particular actors, if they really want to, based on whatever technical criteria they want to use to define "good acting." Likewise, the Sound Engineers' professional association can give out awards for best recording and editing. Hell, the food service people can give out awards for best catering or craft services table.
But the really big awards would be based on the overall quality of the finished product -- the movie -- and not attempt to break it down into particular components. Obviously, the notability of particular people is going to make the movie's award more of a personal honor than others: the lead actor who was in a Best Picture nominated movie is going to benefit more than the 2nd Electrician's Assistant. But they'd both be able to put it on their resume, for whatever it's worth.
Movies themselves are inherently all in competition, and trying to do the same thing -- capture mindshare (and thus revenue, fame, and fortune) by being compelling or otherwise interesting. That's the criteria they should be judged by. The technical aspects of how they achieve this (good writing, acting, publicity, music, karma, whatever) are secondary, and would be better if left to specific groups who are actually interested in the gritty details as a process in themselves (presumably so they can improve it). To the rest of us, the process doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether the next blockbuster is made on a billion-dollar soundstage, or is spat out of the belly of a giant magic machine; either it's a good film or it's not. That's what the Oscars should be all about.
I'm not disagreeing (or even arguing with you) in the slightest ... I'm not really qualified to comment. My point was more that people at the "low end of the totem pole" can really make your life as a mid-level cube monkey a living hell, if you abuse them. At a place I used to work, I knew a guy who was particularly abrasive to employees he perceived to be his 'subordinates,' particularly the office staff. The strangest things used to happen to him -- his conference room reservations always got "lost," his mail got delivered late or mangled, the lights in his cubicle were permanently out, his trash didn't get emptied, etc. -- I guess he just had bad luck. Or something.
Every time I've switched companies, the two groups of people I've always tried to make sure I was on good terms with, were the guys in the mail room, and the secretarial and physical plant staff. The number of times that it's paid off, in terms of making some bureaucratic nightmare just disappear, or work out just that much easier, I can't even tell you. It's the difference between, if I bring down a package that needs to go out in today's mail at 3:02PM, getting told "I'm sorry, you've missed it for the day," and "Sure, I can toss that in for you." The first isn't exactly outright sabotage, but it's what some other people I know would probably get down there.
If I was the guy who had to tell the secretaries that they couldn't bring iPods into work anymore, I'd probably start working from home.
Somewhere around I have an Apple 20MB hard drive that is getting on 15 years old. Sure, it hasn't seen a lot of usage recently, but I still fire it up every once in a while. (It makes the greatest turbine-like startup sound; seriously, it's like a 747.) Connects to the floppy disk controller. Has its own power supply.
I'm sure there are people around with even older, still-working-fine gear. A while back, I saw some DEC disk packs for the early removable-platter hard drives selling on eBay, as pulls-from-working equipment. I'm not sure what exactly was going through the minds of the designers when they were building stuff, a decade or two ago, but they just seemed to not be planning for obsolescence in the same way that the people churning out today's disposable gear are. (Although the sample is clearly biased: looking at the 20-year-old gear from 1986 that's still around today might make you think that everything then was bulletproof, but in reality all the crappy stuff is already 30 feet down in some landfill somewhere.)
I suspect in 20 years, people will look back at 2006 gear as the height of reliability, just because it'll only be the really exceptionally well-built pieces of gear that will still be around. The Deathstars and other crap drives that failed will long be forgotten.
On the other hand, you could get a cheap drive controller, and do software RAID, using OSS tools; the setup might be more complex than hardware RAID, but there shouldn't be any issues with recovering your data later due to the format it's written in.
I agree though, that for most people, some sort of "userland RAID" where the disks are just mounted as regular volumes to the filesystem, and then you just write the data twice, is probably the best bet. There's no format problems, and you'll always be able to pull a drive out, stick it in another machine, and get at your data.
Give me a band that is willing to perform live, unplugged, and I'll respect them. Otherwise all the credit goes to the behind-the-scenes guys that make them not suck.
Sure -- and the credit, rightly, should go to the behind-the-scenes people, if they're the one making the sound. I'm totally with you there. But I don't listen to "unplugged" albums, because to me it's irrelevant. Why do I care if they can play well or not? If I wanted to hear acoustic music, I'd listen to a well-mastered acoustic album, not to a rock group playing with their amps turned off. Unplugged albums seem interesting from a technical and documentary sense -- it would be interesting to a music student, perhaps, to go back and listen to some notable performers and see what they sounded like before the mastering, but I'm not a music student. The only thing I care about is the end product, because that's the only thing I'm qualified to judge. I can't tell a good guitarist from a bad guitarist, but I can tell what I like to listen to.
The musicians' musical talent (or lack thereof) is only interesting insofar as it's the first step in a chain which may or may not result in good music coming out of my stereo. The problem as I see it with the current situation, is that it doesn't recognize the artistry of the people who work "behind the scenes" on all the intermediate steps that happen after the musician does something that results in noise, but before it hits your ear.
Perhaps the problem is that we haven't completely separated "music" in the recorded-sound sense, from the actual act and craft of playing a traditional musical instrument in person. Although I'd say that we're probably edging on semantics, what I care about is less "listening to someone demonstrate their instrument-playing skills" than the overall experience of "listening to a pleasant sound recording." If that sound recording starts off as variations in the pressure of the air in the general vicinity of somebody's mouth, that's well and good, but it could just as easily (and acceptably, to me) begin as some ones-and-zeros in a computer processor somewhere. I don't even care if it comes from a person, or if a person is involved anywhere. (Although I've yet to hear any completely algorithmic music that sounded good. I suspect that it will remain outside the domain of mechanization for a while, at least.)
I can understand that traditional musicians might not like this point of view, because they've invested a lot of time in learning a particular instrument, and probably don't want to lose their top billing on the CD cover to a guy whose 'instrument' is a Pro Tools workstation. But the credit should follow who-ever's skills are really adding the most to the finished products. There were times in the past when the piano or the electric guitar weren't considered polite or acceptable medium for artistic expression, either.
I've worked in corporate R&D labs with relatively high security that still provided wireless access on the grounds of the lab. This is a security risk, perhaps, but one that was mitigated to an extent deemed acceptable, given the value it provided. Another company I worked for, with far less to worry about from a data protection perspective, denied our numerous requests for wireless access on grounds of "security". In other words, they were too incompetent to mitigate the risk involved to provide a valuable service to us.
... assuming that the former is larger in absolute terms than the latter, and neglecting all other IT dept responsibilities, there would have been a demand that wireless be rolled out yesterday (probably with the addendum "isn't that what we give you all that goddamn money for?").
Sometimes it's also funding. I know of a place where the IT department used "security" as a catchall refusal for things they couldn't afford to implement, but didn't want to admit they were incapable of. For example, if an executive asks for wireless, they get told that they can't do it, because of the security risks. The executive grumbles, walks off. If they had said the real reason -- because deploying wireless might have cost a lot -- then it would have been an invitation for the executive to perform the following comparison: [Size of IT Dept Annual Budget] vs [Cost of Wireless Internet]
But telling someone that you can't do it because of vague 'security concerns' sounds a lot better, and invites a lot less inquiry, than 'because we're spending our money elsewhere already, and we don't want to spend it on your pet project.'
If the receptionist is assumed to be untrustworthy, then they could just as easily install a real hardware keylogger in between the PC and the keyboard. (And that would be a lot easier to get than an iPod-disguised keylogger.)
I'm not saying that there aren't situations where barring anything that could carry data away is appropriate. It's just that IT types seem to hone in on the "security breaches" that they can shore up, to the greatest inconvenience of users, while ignoring glaring holes elsewhere. If you're going to tell the secretary that she can't charge her iPod from the USB port because of the risk of keylogging, I hope that the keyboard's PS/2 connector is superglued in, or the entire chassis is encased in a locked steel container. Otherwise you're ignoring an obvious avenue of attack (like these), but going after a highly unlikely one, even though the treatment for the unlikely one annoys the user more.
Most IT departments have so many security problems and vulnerabilities, it's hard to even know where to start. But rather than working through them in a rational way, they seem to begin with the premise that "anything that annoys the users in the name of security must be good." (Probably not their fault; it's probably an attempt to placate a PHB somewhere by making the security really obvious...)
It's ultimately a glass-houses issue. Before overt, draconian security measures are put in place, everything else ought to be locked up already. Otherwise, it just makes the IT department look like they're power-tripping, regardless of the real motivation. And in the corporate world, it's not good to make everyone else hate you. Particularly the secretaries.
Really, the two of them were the biggest fans of the artists whose work they fair-used. They did this as an homage. Yeah. That's the ticket.
If only they had stuck to Open Source Classical Music.
Indeed they were, and in the early 20th century, a combination of photography and a host of other mechanical, mass-productive technologies, prompted a critical rethinking of what "art" was.
The seminal work in this line of thinking, IMO, was by a guy named Walter Benjamin, and it's called The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction . It's not exactly a light read, but I think anyone with an interest in modern digital media or art ought to try to muddle through it (or an analysis of it), because some of the points he makes are still quite salient. (Actually, I'd go further, and say that Benjamin's words are more important now, with digital reproduction, than they were in the 1930s when he wrote them, when the only reproductive methods available were analog and inherently lossy, more akin to making a new but very similar work, than to actually duplicating the existing one, so that there are two absolutely identical new artworks in existence.)
Basically, he argues that mechanical reproduction allows you to remove art from its real-world context. (Benjamin calls the context, and other stuff that is lost when a piece of art is reproduced, its "aura.")Benjamin's point, in my uneducated opinion, seems to be that although modern forms of art get further and further away from objective "reality" (by separating the art from its context and breaking the aura), it allows for new possibilities that older art wasn't as conducive to. Films allowed for the shared experience by many people of the same thing, at virtually the same time, in a way that theater couldn't do (if I go to a play, even if you go to the 'same' play the next night, you will not have seen the same thing that I saw; your experience will be subtly different; furthermore, it's possible to do things in a film that cannot be done on stage) -- this is an opportunity that skilled artists have been able to take advantage of. Similarly, 21st century post-digital art, which is entirely reproducible, will allow even more.
Case in point: I'm sure Tom Cruise, Ben Afflec, etc, would be perfectly capable of being garbage men. But how many garbage men would be able to do their jobs? Although some refuse to recognize it, there are quite a few fairly complex skills actors have to master to be good. This is where the 'honesty' thing comes in. Acting is, essentially, dishonest; but it's the honesty of the performance that actors are worried about. They are paid to act, and if a computer can do half of the acting for them, then what are they supposed to do??
If the garbage man was named "Tom Cruise," any one you wanted. What those 'big name' actors have is brand power. They're marketing. In terms of skills, you can see better acting in most community theaters in any major U.S. city. (Okay, so it's not exactly garbagemen, but the skills aren't that uncommon.) But those people aren't worth anything, because nobody knows who they are, thus a movie they were in wouldn't be a guaranteed blockbuster like Cruise and Affleck. Because of the very high risk to reward ratio of acting as a career, there are doubtless lots of people in more secure lines of work, who would be better actors than those currently doing it, but who don't want to run the risk that committing to it (which is required to have a shot, basically) would involve. Not everyone who has a set of skills necessarily wants to use them.
The reason big stars get paid so much, is because they're worth even more to the movie producers. They earn their salaries, usually, in the first weekend that a movie opens; I could think of dozens of films that were utter crap, but generated wads of cash for some studio, by virtue of "star power." Thus, those people have a big market value, and assuming they can negotiate well, they get pretty close to what they're worth.
This situation isn't anything new; acting hasn't been a meritocracy of any sort in decades, if indeed it ever was. There's certainly a minimum skill level that you need to have in order to be able to do the job, but it's not that high. Luck plays a much bigger role, plus personality, people skills, and of course, connections. Once you get name recognition, it's a self-perpetuating gig; assuming you don't screw it up (by getting arrested or otherwise tarnishing your own image).
Why does it matter?
... everyone all the way down to the gaffers and lighting people. It's silly to try and pick out what's a product of the actor him- or herself; the important thing is the quality and enjoyability of the finished product. If it looks good, it is good. Nothing else matters.
People seem to have this obsession over "authenticity," as if it matters apart from the quality of the output that they actually witness. I've seen it a lot in music, too, where it's even more ridiculous.
The mantra of an old sound engineer I used to know seem appropriate: "If it sounds good, it is good."
The 'process' is only important to other people engaged in the Art, and to yourself if you're the artist, so you know what you did right (if the output is good), or wrong (if it's crap). The audience doesn't, and shouldn't, really care. Does it matter what kind of microphone the engineer used on the kick drum, if what's on the tape sounds good? Of course not. Hell, it doesn't matter if there was a kick drum. Maybe it was just a drum machine, or a sampled sound. The only important thing is the finished composition. If it sounds good, then the process worked; if it sounds like crap, then it doesn't matter how much effort went into it, it's still crap. Likewise, it shouldn't matter whether the vocalist really hit that note, or whether they were pushed with an auto-tuner. Does the ultimate effect work? That's the real question.
Likewise, I don't particularly care whether Jennifer Connelly's tears were real or not, because I don't care whether she can actually act or not. I only care whether it appears that she can act, insofar as she does a good job in the role, and the movie is good. If the movie is good, then the process was good; if the movie sucked, I don't care whether she was a good actress or not, I still will have wasted $9.50 and two hours of my life.
The only reason why we ought to care, or pay any attention at all, to where the "quality" comes from, is so we can award credit and compensation correctly. When I listen to a song, I don't give a damn whether the musicians "can actually play," so long as what's coming out of my speakers sounds pleasant. It's completely academic to me whether that 'pleasantness' was produced by the musician on the guitar, or by the guy at the mastering house in postproduction. However, I'd prefer, if the actual artistry and skill that makes the music nice to listen to, occurs at the mixing board rather than at the guitar, that the guy at the mixing console get his name listed at the top of the CD's label (if only so I can see what else he did and find it easily).
Modern entertainment-art is not a product of any one person; it's almost always collaborative. A movie is made not just by the actors, but by the actors, writers, director, editors
You could just as easily establish the brand value with a (hypothetical) CGI actor, as you could with a real person. Heck, they do it with cartoon characters and puppets right now. Why have they bothered to make three Toy Story pictures, instead of just stopping after #1 and making two different movies? It's because those characters -- even though they're nothing but some ray-traced computer models and voice-overs -- have established the same type of brand value that flesh-and-blood actors have. Maybe not Tom Cruise levels of brand value, but hey, at least Buzz Lightyear isn't ever going to freak out and join the Scientologists on you.
Cards are a rather flawed system, particularly when not in person. Not to mention how unfriendly credit cards are to customers. It's wonderful to have cash now, but not worth the interest charges. Past that, their unfriendly to merchants, but due to the "convenience" of cards, they're all but required.
Cards are effectively required because of one thing: ATM surcharges.
Customers use credit cards, and their kin, debit cards, because it's obnoxious and impractical to use cash anymore. If you get your paycheck direct-deposited into a checking account, it's much easier to pay with plastic (and then either write a single check at the end of the month, or have it debited electronically) than it is to go to the ATM, withdraw cash, pay with cash, and then deal with the resultant change. Plus, it's difficult to find an ATM that doesn't charge you a fee for getting cash.
To a consumer, using cash costs money -- if you withdraw in $50 increments, it could be as much as 4-6% ($2 to $3 per ATM transaction) -- while using a debit or credit card is free.
If it weren't for ATM fees, I'd probably still use cash more often. But given that my bank doesn't have any local branches, and it's a pain to constantly worry about where the nearest fee-free ATM is, it's easier just to use plastic for everything. There are more merchants around who accept credit cards, than there are fee-free ATMs.
Some friends of mine still tell a story from pre-internet days: an obviously fraudulent order was reported to the police, who actually took action(!) Two police officers dressed as couriers delivered a fake parcel and nicked the thief when he signed for it.
This is what really gets me about internet/mail-order fraud. The risks would be huge if the police gave a shit, since frequently it is blatantly obvious, and the thief has given the place and time he's going to receive the goods, and all that has to be done is turn up and put cuffs on him. No-one cares though.
They start to care when the amount of money exceeds trivial amounts, though. Not too long ago, I spent some time living in a house with a few guys (*cough* Craigslist *cough*). One of the other people in the house was actively engaged, I suspected, in some type of shady dealing. Needless to say, I moved out in a heck of a hurry. As it all came out later, this not-too-bright fellow thought he had discovered the perfect scheme: he was copying credit card numbers down at work, and then using them to buy things online, which he had shipped to various empty houses, and then he'd go and pick the stuff up later, and pawn or fence it on eBay. (And this is pretty much all I know about it; I don't quite get how he was getting the billing zip codes, which are usually required, or anything else.)
He got away with it for quite a while, too -- somewhere around six months, maybe more -- probably because he never used the same card more than once, never bought stuff from the same online store, and never charged more than $100 or so per card. But eventually the credit card companies must have caught on, and run all the accounts that had disputed charges through some sort of filter, and figured out that the common thread was the retail establishment where he worked. One day, according to the story I heard, they just walked in and arrested him. They had a stack of photos of him picking up packages from other people's houses, plus transaction details from the various merchants with the stolen CC numbers and the shipping addresses.
So both the credit card companies and the police have some level of interest in going after people engaged in fraudulent activity, but the bar seems to be pretty high. I've no idea how much money had to go missing before someone at one of the CC companies (or an automated program of some sort) decided to take a closer look and see what the common thread was, but it must have been in the thousands of dollars, perhaps tens of thousands.
In this case, I don't see how the merchants would have ever caught on; to all the places where things were ordered, it looked just like a regular transaction. It was only at the CC back offices, where they had the ability to cross-reference all the suspect accounts and see that they had all visited the same store within the past 24-48 hours (or whatever, I assume this is how they caught on), that they had the capability of doing anything. To push the financial burden out to the merchants, probably would have meant that he could have gotten away even longer.
That sounds the exact same complaint against religious fundamentalists.
It's pretty much the same complaint that any reasonable person ought to have against any fundamentalist, regardless of ideological stripe.
Because most people are idiots?
In my state, the public-school system is funded, in large part, by a tax on people who are bad at math. It works startlingly well, even though in a rational world, it wouldn't draw in a cent.
A system that assumed that people will do the rational, productive (heck, even the self-interested) thing in the long term, is probably doomed to failure. People aren't rational, and frankly, given the choice between thinking and not thinking, they seem to overwhelmingly choose the latter.
All joking aside, the radio-interference issue is a non-trivial one to many people (including myself) who are concerned about mass producing a whole lot of anything that's going to possibly mess up the shortwave or HF radio bands. Luckily, most CFLs don't seem to be too bad. There are a lot of anecdotal reports of ham radio operators using them alongside HF radios without problems, and the manufacturers themselves seem to be cognizant of the problem.
In case anyone is interested in specific figures, there is a chart of RFI versus frequency from a typical CFL ballast here (go to the very end of the document for the graph).