I doubt very much that the preference for warm lighting existed prior to the widespread introduction of incandescent lighting. Before then, most people spent the majority of their time under 5000K light from the sun, and a much smaller portion (relative to the time we now spend indoors) with candles or gaslights. But the "warm" artificial lighting would definitely have been the exception, and daylight the rule. Now, it's almost the opposite way around; people perceive the light from incandescent bulbs as 'normal,' and bulbs that produce light that's actually similar to the big glowing thing outdoors as "cold" and "harsh."
There's probably some deep-rooted psychological link between lower color temperatures and "warmth," and associated feelings of security (because fires produce lower temperature light compared to the sun, fires = warmth and usually, safety), but I think most of it is social, and that we've acclimated to a home life that's lit by incandescent bulbs.
I switched my bedroom and home office to daylight fluorescent bulbs a while back, and after getting used to them, rooms lit with conventional (3500K) incandescent bulbs seem very 'yellow' and seem stuffy in comparison. The light from the fluorescents also blends much better with the natural light from the room's windows than the incandescent light did, and there's less of a change during the day (previously, during the morning when there was a lot of window light, it would seem very blue, then during the day as the sun would fade, I'd turn more incadescent lamps on to compensate, and everything would get yellow; now, when it gets dark, I put on the fluorescents, and it's just like turning the sun back on).
I think it's more like the car stereos that are "theft resistant" because, once removed from the car, they require some sort of master password to re-activate. I don't know much about stereo theft, but I can only assume that most thieves have ways around this (probably just swiping the car's manual out of the glovebox when they take the radio).
But that's basically the idea; it hopefully makes the item just unattractive enough for a thief, so they move on to easier pastures.
Using a (signed) 64-bit value introduces a new wraparound date in about 290 billion years, on Sunday, December 4, 292,277,026,596. However, this problem is not widely regarded as a pressing issue.
This is perhaps one of the most balanced and insightful things I've read on Slashdot recently. Ironic that it's sitting at +3.
Anyway, I think your analysis of morality is right on; there is very little point in discussing morality, at least outside of Philosophy classes, because people approach it from radically different angles. People can take the same action for very different reasons, even if they both end up doing the "right thing" as viewed by a third party.
Also, your comment about what's essentially a 'popularity contest' question cloaked in a moral dilemma is right on. If I had to guess, I'd say about 90% of people's "moral dilemmas" are really nothing more than ways of gauging the relative acceptability of various courses of action within their peer groups, and trying to figure out what's going to score them the most points (or damage them the least). This question in particular reeks of "would people hate me if I did x?"
As to the question at hand, I think providing the service would be a bad idea, but for different reasons; students need to learn to solve problems themselves, and not wait for some deus ex machina in the form of an ad-supported service to solve it for them. Left to their own devices, some enterprising young geek will figure out how to get around the filtering by themselves. It's not as if it's very hard -- a CGI reverse-proxy is one way, SSHing to a home computer on Port 80 (with the -D option) is another, there are lots of other methods -- and once they work it out, they can be the heroes of the day to the other MySpace-loving students. By providing a commercial filter-avoidance service, you are stealing the fire from some student who might figure it out themselves. But more importantly than one or two students, you are teaching all the students who use it, that all they have to do when they run into something that's a pain, is wait for someone else to solve the problem and hand it to them. It's the difference between letting them understand that the solution comes from someone else like them, who happens to understand a bit about computers, versus a solution that seems to come down from On High, by way of an anonymous web site ridden with ads.
I am a firm believer that in order to become productive, fully-mature adults, young people need to develop a healthy cynicism towards, and distrust of, authority. Otherwise, they're nothing but little brainless larval consumers, parroting back what they've memorized, and doing what they're told. They need to learn to break the rules on their own, and that they can break the rules on their own. Replacing one authority (whoever runs the filtering) for another (whoever runs the ad-supported reverse-proxy) isn't instructive. Placing an idiotic barrier (like all web-filtering is) in between them and something they want, and letting them get over it themselves, is.
I don't think that a few truckloads of old PIIIs are really what they need. While there might be a way to recycle some old hardware and make it useful, it's entirely possible that it would cost more, in technical time and electricity, to use lots of old hardware in the place of a few units of newer gear.
Let's say they need a database server, which could be accomplished either with a new 1U Opteron box, or half a dozen junker Pentiums; those Pentiums might look like a good deal on the surface, but they're going to take up much more power, produce more heat, take up more rack space, and require more administrative attention than the Opteron.
While a critical look should definitely be taken at all hardware purchases, sometimes just because you could dumpster-dive for old equipment and make it work, doesn't mean you should.
To get the figures I mentioned earlier, for the "text" figure, I chose Save As through Firefox and had it save to a TXT file. This (I think) gets you a little more than a straight copy/paste, but not that much more. For the HTML but without the CSS, I saved it to HTML; if you view that you'll see that it gets some very basic formatting, like the indents and links, but not the more sophisticated stuff. Then for the whole shebang, I used the "Web Page, Complete" option, which grabs the HTML to a file, and all of its referenced files and put them in a folder. The quoted figure was the HTML file plus the total size of the directory with all the referenced stuff (which includes CSS, graphics, etc.). I surf with AdBlock, so it didn't include those.
This was browsing basically at level 1, although I can't remember all of the modifiers I have set up for what is shown and what's not.
That's a very interesting diagram. Pretty fascinating, actually.
What raised my eyebrows is that, if it's accurate, there are a whole lot of junction points under the water, which strikes me as impractical. Is that how things actually work? Are there actually cable junctions, with switches and routers, on the seabed? Or are there just a lot of point to point links, routed as if there were direct links between each station and a central trunk?
Just in case anyone else was wondering exactly how bad it is:
The text on this page, saved using Firefox, came to 140kB. The HTML, not including the CSS and other stuff, is 196k. The whole thing, including all Slashdot graphics (but not including ads) and all the referenced CSS, was 792kB.
threaten its ability to maintain its technological lead
What technological lead? The "U.S." doesn't have one. All we have is the honor of being home-port to a bunch of large multinational corporations, who seem to do most of the actual production, and they do most of their manufacturing and an increasing amount of their research overseas. We couldn't make half the stuff that "American" companies sell, and U.S. consumers take for granted; it's all made and increasingly designed overseas.
We're a market for goods and capital, and a source of lawyers, marketers, and middle-managers. And "intellectual property," which the rest of the world could quickly decide to do without, if it wanted to.
I think history is going to look back, and see the Internet as the last significant achievement of a dying empire.
This is just the transciever chip; it has to have an external antenna. Elsewhere, people have discussed their current chip offerings, which have antennas in the ~50mm range. Generally they print them out in the shape of a labyrinth-like square, to take up less space, but it still increases the size pretty dramatically.
I suspect if you took the same antenna and made it into a 3d cube instead of a 2d concentric spiral, you'd probably end up with something pretty small... still, not "dust" size.
Just out of curiosity, and I agree that the committee system seems to be broken, how else should we determine appointments?
My personal feeling is that it should be via some sort of single combat, or perhaps trial by ordeal (first one to the other side of the Potomac gets Ways and Means!)... some sort of intelligence test would probably be best, but I'd be afraid they'd all fail.
Just to expand on the point I think you're making, companies generally go out of business when the profit they generate is less than the amount of money that a similar amount of capital could make, if invested elsewhere.
I.e., if your semiconductor business, which has physical and cash assets of $1B USD, is generating less than $1B invested directly in the stock market, then it probably doesn't make sense to keep going, unless you expect that you can turn the company around and get it more profitable.
In real life, many companies shut down (or get shut down by their investors) when the price per share * shares outstanding is less than the net real assets of the corporation. That's basically saying that the stock value, which is sort of a prediction of the company's future performance and overall "market value," is worth less than the assets that it's using. Thus, it's liquidated. (However, there were some exceptions to this; there were companies in the 1980s that were basically ravaged by "raider" investors and sold off piecemeal, who probably could have been turned around under better management.)
Many people like to push the "control the consumer" and "make them re-buy things" theories here, but honestly, do you really think that's the reason?
In a word, yes. The revenue due to the forced repurchase of content -- "enabling new business models" is the market-speak used normally -- is far greater than the revenue gained by preventing some casual piracy. Every DRM system can be bypassed by people who value their time at a low enough level (students, people in Third-World countries) to make it worthwhile, or via analog means by people who don't care about quality. The only thing that's prevented is the so-called "casual" piracy, or people who might make a bit-perfect copy of a disk and share it, if they had the opportunity. This purpose is served by a trivial DRM implementation, like placing a key or ID code in a portion of a disk that's not writable on consumer media (c.f. DVD-R). The really intense DRM systems exist not to prevent casual piracy, but to prevent casual format-shifting, which to the labels and media companies, is exactly the same as piracy.
To them, it's all lost revenue; any time someone listens to a song and doesn't pony up, they see that as a missed opportunity to extract revenue from the consumer/listener. So by that metric, there is no difference between Fair Use and piracy, or between copying your LP to a CD, or downloading it from the Internet. The music companies would like to make both illegal.
Your problem is that you're assuming that DRM has something to do with preventing piracy.
That is a fallacy. It is something the music companies would like you to think, but it is not really true. DRM is about "maximizing revenue," principally by allowing the record companies to sell the same piece of music over and over, in different formats. Basically, is purpose is to eliminate format-shifting altogether, because that way they can charge independently for a song on CD, as a digital file for an iPod, as a digital file for a cellphone, as a ringtone, etc. etc.
The music companies have realized that digitization basically means the end of formats that wear out over time, and it will also mean that it's pretty trivial to move your music from one type of playback device (e.g. iPod) to $NEXT_YEARS_DEVICE without them seeing a dime. Since their business model historically has derived a lot of revenue from the repurchasing of music in new formats (45s, 8-tracks, LPs, cassette tape, CD), they want to stop this, even though it's allowed by Fair Use as a simple format shift.
DRM is only nominally about piracy; in truth, it's about squeezing more money from honest consumers.
Not true; what about theoreticians? They'd probably be pretty offended to be left out of "scientists," although they don't do a whole lot of "research" at least in the traditional sense. (Some do, though, but with theoretical stuff you have to have a fairly loose definition of 'research,' since a whole lot of it resembles 'preparing for publication.')
"Research scientist" is probably a better term for the woman in TFA; "scientist" alone is so vague as to be almost unusable. It's just 'someone doing science,' and could be pretty much anyone from a grad student to a Nobel laureate; it doesn't say anything about what type or kind of science they're engaged in, or what their goals are.
I don't think there's any real reason to, if you're familiar with Linux... Sun would like people to use Solaris, and they have some interesting administration tools, and of course they'll sell you a support contract and might be more "PHB compatible" than many Linux vendors, but I've yet to see any good comparisons.
A while back there were some interesting comparisons of SQL performance on Darwin/Mac OS X versus Linux, under controlled conditions on similar hardware; it would be interesting to see a Sun-AMP versus LAMP comparison, done by some disinterested party, using the same versions of all the same software except for the OS, wherever possible. If Sun could outperform Linux, it would be intriguing... but if they can't, except for people who already are familiar and more comfortable with it than they are with Linux, I don't see a major draw.
I believe that you're correct (and Wikipedia agrees with you at the moment, saying "the fully automated solution for decrypting HDDVD/BluRay is yet to be done with this approach"), however I've yet to see a really good explanation of how today's crack actually works. There seems to be a lot of conflicting terminology at work; VUK, "processing key," "media key," etc.
My understanding of AACS, gleaned from Wikipedia and other sources, is as follows: the whole thing begins with several keys. One is a title key, which is generated for each movie (or one pressing of a particular movie), and is actually used to encrypt the video stream. Then, there is a Volume Identifier, which is basically a serial number on each pressed disc, located on a part of the disc which can't be written to by consumer disc writers (just like on DVD discs). The Volume ID and the title key are combined (or hashed); I think this combination of the two is what's being called the "Volume Unique Key" (VUK).
In order to make sure that only approved players can decrypt this whole thing, the VUK is encrypted using a randomly generated, per-title key provided by the AACS people. This key (the one used to encrypt the VUK) is called the Media Key, and it's not provided on the disc in the clear at all. It's provided as part of a "Media Key Block," which is the Media Key, encrypted with all the current player keys (so, it's there several hundred times at least, one for every model of approved player).
On the receiving end, the player reads the disc and extracts the Volume ID, the encrypted VUK (which the AACS documentation refers to as the Encrypted Title Key), and the Media Key Block. It gets the Media Key from the Media Key Block by using its secret Device Key, and then uses the Media Key and the Volume ID to decrypt the Encrypted Title Key, and get the Title Key. And from there, plays the video.
What I don't quite get, though -- and it would be great if anyone could fill me in, here -- is how today's crack fits into this whole scheme. What the crack seems to provide, is a way of producing a VUK for any disk, given the Volume ID, which is transmitted from the drive to the host computer in the clear (and is stored on the disc in the clear). But I don't see how this is possible, since the VUK also depends on the Title Key -- and if you know the Title Key, you're already done.
Anyone want to take a stab at explaining how the whole thing works, in something approaching understandable (or at least consistent, defined) terms? The Wikipedia article is not a lot of help right now.
Are we getting to the point, or will we get there in our lifetimes, where an artist cannot afford to pay attention to, watch, look at, read, etc. any works that are not in the public domain or that carry a free license of some sort? Sort of like where people say we are today with respect to software patents.
We are already there. I know several published authors of poetry and fiction, who intentionally do not read anything else that's even remotely close to their own genre of work, because of the fear that they will internalize it and somehow incorporate it into their own work later on, unwittingly. In their case, their fear is driven less by the possible legal repercussions than of the career / artistic suicide that being labeled as a plagiarist would be; as was the case a while back with that Indian girl who wrote the YA novel that had some suspiciously close passages to other novels, it's possible to make yourself a literary untouchable, without actually violating copyright per se. Sometimes those MFAs can be more vicious than the J.D.'s, particularly where "ethical" lapses are concerned.
This sort of firewalling would be tougher, I'd imagine, for a non-fiction writer, since it's nearly impossible to be a decent historian if you don't keep current on what others in your field are doing; the same is true for other fields. Unless you are writing about a topic specialized enough to be all your own, or you are basically just reporting research that you have done from primary sources, you're going to have to begin with things that others have written, and that brings with it the risk of plagiarism, whether intentional nor not.
I've also read several interviews with well known authors where they report the same thing. I think Steven King might have been one of them; IIRC he said that he doesn't really read much other horror fiction, and when he does, it's only when he's taking a break from his own writing for a while. During the actual creative process, reading anything that might be "inspirational" could be dangerous, since the line between what is acceptable and what is unethical is so grey, and dangerous.
Well if they want to be assholes about it, why not just drop them off of the database completely?
It seems to me that Google is in a good position now to offer a deal to sites; they can either agree to be crawled, and thus end up in a cache for 30 days or whatever, or they can just not end up in the index at all. Their option.
Get rid of the "oh we want to be in the index and get traffic, but not be cached" option, which is basically web sites wanting to have their cake and eat it too.
I think these sites have an inflated opinion of their own relevance to the world. They can sue Google, but Google can effectively remove them from the Internet, at least as far as 70-90% (depending on who's doing the counting) of users are concerned.
Fascinating... thanks very much for the info. I had no idea that IBM's Haifa Lab was actually Ubique under a different name. I had thought that it seemed like there must be some "missing link" between IBM's Sametime and AIM, so now that makes sense.
I always thought that the idea of the "tour" (basically, a way to browse the web "cooperatively" with a group of people) in Virtual Places was neat; it was one of those technologies that really made it seem as if some metaverse-ish virtual world was right around the corner, in 1994. It never really caught on though, and today, I suspect that many users would find a universal "who else is browsing this page" feature creepy, because they've gotten used to it as a solitary experience.
When I said "public sector," I meant 'the portion of the private sector which is devoted in whole or large part to fulfilling the demands of the public, i.e. governmental, sector; in particular U.S. government contractors.' The field is dominated by a number of well-known and very large players, which compete with each other on one hand, but also seem to have certain gentlemanly agreements on the other. They are, for most intents and purposes, essentially in a grey area somewhere between temp agencies which only serve the government, and wholesale private government agencies.
Most people who haven't been involved in the Federal government don't have any idea how much of the day-to-day operations of the USG is handled by contractors; I can personally assure you that if all the contractors decided not to show up for work one day, the government would literally stop.
One thing you don't hear much about, is what progress, if any, is being made in interfacing electronic systems into biologic ones, and growing biologic circuits. Perhaps our understanding of biological computation and storage simply isn't complete enough to make such a system practical, even if we were able to somehow interface a clump of neurons to the outside world electronically, but it certainly seems like the data storage capacity of biologic systems is far greater (per mass/volume) than anything devised artificially. Although, I suppose it's impossible to equate, since it's not clear how 'compressed' information is, when it's encoded by the mammalian brain as memories.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt very much that the preference for warm lighting existed prior to the widespread introduction of incandescent lighting. Before then, most people spent the majority of their time under 5000K light from the sun, and a much smaller portion (relative to the time we now spend indoors) with candles or gaslights. But the "warm" artificial lighting would definitely have been the exception, and daylight the rule. Now, it's almost the opposite way around; people perceive the light from incandescent bulbs as 'normal,' and bulbs that produce light that's actually similar to the big glowing thing outdoors as "cold" and "harsh."
There's probably some deep-rooted psychological link between lower color temperatures and "warmth," and associated feelings of security (because fires produce lower temperature light compared to the sun, fires = warmth and usually, safety), but I think most of it is social, and that we've acclimated to a home life that's lit by incandescent bulbs.
I switched my bedroom and home office to daylight fluorescent bulbs a while back, and after getting used to them, rooms lit with conventional (3500K) incandescent bulbs seem very 'yellow' and seem stuffy in comparison. The light from the fluorescents also blends much better with the natural light from the room's windows than the incandescent light did, and there's less of a change during the day (previously, during the morning when there was a lot of window light, it would seem very blue, then during the day as the sun would fade, I'd turn more incadescent lamps on to compensate, and everything would get yellow; now, when it gets dark, I put on the fluorescents, and it's just like turning the sun back on).
I think it's more like the car stereos that are "theft resistant" because, once removed from the car, they require some sort of master password to re-activate. I don't know much about stereo theft, but I can only assume that most thieves have ways around this (probably just swiping the car's manual out of the glovebox when they take the radio).
But that's basically the idea; it hopefully makes the item just unattractive enough for a thief, so they move on to easier pastures.
This is perhaps one of the most balanced and insightful things I've read on Slashdot recently. Ironic that it's sitting at +3.
Anyway, I think your analysis of morality is right on; there is very little point in discussing morality, at least outside of Philosophy classes, because people approach it from radically different angles. People can take the same action for very different reasons, even if they both end up doing the "right thing" as viewed by a third party.
Also, your comment about what's essentially a 'popularity contest' question cloaked in a moral dilemma is right on. If I had to guess, I'd say about 90% of people's "moral dilemmas" are really nothing more than ways of gauging the relative acceptability of various courses of action within their peer groups, and trying to figure out what's going to score them the most points (or damage them the least). This question in particular reeks of "would people hate me if I did x?"
As to the question at hand, I think providing the service would be a bad idea, but for different reasons; students need to learn to solve problems themselves, and not wait for some deus ex machina in the form of an ad-supported service to solve it for them. Left to their own devices, some enterprising young geek will figure out how to get around the filtering by themselves. It's not as if it's very hard -- a CGI reverse-proxy is one way, SSHing to a home computer on Port 80 (with the -D option) is another, there are lots of other methods -- and once they work it out, they can be the heroes of the day to the other MySpace-loving students. By providing a commercial filter-avoidance service, you are stealing the fire from some student who might figure it out themselves. But more importantly than one or two students, you are teaching all the students who use it, that all they have to do when they run into something that's a pain, is wait for someone else to solve the problem and hand it to them. It's the difference between letting them understand that the solution comes from someone else like them, who happens to understand a bit about computers, versus a solution that seems to come down from On High, by way of an anonymous web site ridden with ads.
I am a firm believer that in order to become productive, fully-mature adults, young people need to develop a healthy cynicism towards, and distrust of, authority. Otherwise, they're nothing but little brainless larval consumers, parroting back what they've memorized, and doing what they're told. They need to learn to break the rules on their own, and that they can break the rules on their own. Replacing one authority (whoever runs the filtering) for another (whoever runs the ad-supported reverse-proxy) isn't instructive. Placing an idiotic barrier (like all web-filtering is) in between them and something they want, and letting them get over it themselves, is.
I don't think that a few truckloads of old PIIIs are really what they need. While there might be a way to recycle some old hardware and make it useful, it's entirely possible that it would cost more, in technical time and electricity, to use lots of old hardware in the place of a few units of newer gear.
Let's say they need a database server, which could be accomplished either with a new 1U Opteron box, or half a dozen junker Pentiums; those Pentiums might look like a good deal on the surface, but they're going to take up much more power, produce more heat, take up more rack space, and require more administrative attention than the Opteron.
While a critical look should definitely be taken at all hardware purchases, sometimes just because you could dumpster-dive for old equipment and make it work, doesn't mean you should.
To get the figures I mentioned earlier, for the "text" figure, I chose Save As through Firefox and had it save to a TXT file. This (I think) gets you a little more than a straight copy/paste, but not that much more. For the HTML but without the CSS, I saved it to HTML; if you view that you'll see that it gets some very basic formatting, like the indents and links, but not the more sophisticated stuff. Then for the whole shebang, I used the "Web Page, Complete" option, which grabs the HTML to a file, and all of its referenced files and put them in a folder. The quoted figure was the HTML file plus the total size of the directory with all the referenced stuff (which includes CSS, graphics, etc.). I surf with AdBlock, so it didn't include those.
This was browsing basically at level 1, although I can't remember all of the modifiers I have set up for what is shown and what's not.
That's a very interesting diagram. Pretty fascinating, actually.
What raised my eyebrows is that, if it's accurate, there are a whole lot of junction points under the water, which strikes me as impractical. Is that how things actually work? Are there actually cable junctions, with switches and routers, on the seabed? Or are there just a lot of point to point links, routed as if there were direct links between each station and a central trunk?
Just in case anyone else was wondering exactly how bad it is:
The text on this page, saved using Firefox, came to 140kB. The HTML, not including the CSS and other stuff, is 196k. The whole thing, including all Slashdot graphics (but not including ads) and all the referenced CSS, was 792kB.
"tax money goes to womens relief shelters, I pay taxes, therefore I have the right to beat and rape women."
Is there a Godwin's Law for wife-beating? Because there should be.
threaten its ability to maintain its technological lead
What technological lead? The "U.S." doesn't have one. All we have is the honor of being home-port to a bunch of large multinational corporations, who seem to do most of the actual production, and they do most of their manufacturing and an increasing amount of their research overseas. We couldn't make half the stuff that "American" companies sell, and U.S. consumers take for granted; it's all made and increasingly designed overseas.
We're a market for goods and capital, and a source of lawyers, marketers, and middle-managers. And "intellectual property," which the rest of the world could quickly decide to do without, if it wanted to.
I think history is going to look back, and see the Internet as the last significant achievement of a dying empire.
This is just the transciever chip; it has to have an external antenna. Elsewhere, people have discussed their current chip offerings, which have antennas in the ~50mm range. Generally they print them out in the shape of a labyrinth-like square, to take up less space, but it still increases the size pretty dramatically.
... still, not "dust" size.
I suspect if you took the same antenna and made it into a 3d cube instead of a 2d concentric spiral, you'd probably end up with something pretty small
Just out of curiosity, and I agree that the committee system seems to be broken, how else should we determine appointments?
... some sort of intelligence test would probably be best, but I'd be afraid they'd all fail.
My personal feeling is that it should be via some sort of single combat, or perhaps trial by ordeal (first one to the other side of the Potomac gets Ways and Means!)
Just to expand on the point I think you're making, companies generally go out of business when the profit they generate is less than the amount of money that a similar amount of capital could make, if invested elsewhere.
I.e., if your semiconductor business, which has physical and cash assets of $1B USD, is generating less than $1B invested directly in the stock market, then it probably doesn't make sense to keep going, unless you expect that you can turn the company around and get it more profitable.
In real life, many companies shut down (or get shut down by their investors) when the price per share * shares outstanding is less than the net real assets of the corporation. That's basically saying that the stock value, which is sort of a prediction of the company's future performance and overall "market value," is worth less than the assets that it's using. Thus, it's liquidated. (However, there were some exceptions to this; there were companies in the 1980s that were basically ravaged by "raider" investors and sold off piecemeal, who probably could have been turned around under better management.)
Many people like to push the "control the consumer" and "make them re-buy things" theories here, but honestly, do you really think that's the reason?
In a word, yes. The revenue due to the forced repurchase of content -- "enabling new business models" is the market-speak used normally -- is far greater than the revenue gained by preventing some casual piracy. Every DRM system can be bypassed by people who value their time at a low enough level (students, people in Third-World countries) to make it worthwhile, or via analog means by people who don't care about quality. The only thing that's prevented is the so-called "casual" piracy, or people who might make a bit-perfect copy of a disk and share it, if they had the opportunity. This purpose is served by a trivial DRM implementation, like placing a key or ID code in a portion of a disk that's not writable on consumer media (c.f. DVD-R). The really intense DRM systems exist not to prevent casual piracy, but to prevent casual format-shifting, which to the labels and media companies, is exactly the same as piracy.
To them, it's all lost revenue; any time someone listens to a song and doesn't pony up, they see that as a missed opportunity to extract revenue from the consumer/listener. So by that metric, there is no difference between Fair Use and piracy, or between copying your LP to a CD, or downloading it from the Internet. The music companies would like to make both illegal.
Your problem is that you're assuming that DRM has something to do with preventing piracy.
That is a fallacy. It is something the music companies would like you to think, but it is not really true. DRM is about "maximizing revenue," principally by allowing the record companies to sell the same piece of music over and over, in different formats. Basically, is purpose is to eliminate format-shifting altogether, because that way they can charge independently for a song on CD, as a digital file for an iPod, as a digital file for a cellphone, as a ringtone, etc. etc.
The music companies have realized that digitization basically means the end of formats that wear out over time, and it will also mean that it's pretty trivial to move your music from one type of playback device (e.g. iPod) to $NEXT_YEARS_DEVICE without them seeing a dime. Since their business model historically has derived a lot of revenue from the repurchasing of music in new formats (45s, 8-tracks, LPs, cassette tape, CD), they want to stop this, even though it's allowed by Fair Use as a simple format shift.
DRM is only nominally about piracy; in truth, it's about squeezing more money from honest consumers.
Not true; what about theoreticians? They'd probably be pretty offended to be left out of "scientists," although they don't do a whole lot of "research" at least in the traditional sense. (Some do, though, but with theoretical stuff you have to have a fairly loose definition of 'research,' since a whole lot of it resembles 'preparing for publication.')
"Research scientist" is probably a better term for the woman in TFA; "scientist" alone is so vague as to be almost unusable. It's just 'someone doing science,' and could be pretty much anyone from a grad student to a Nobel laureate; it doesn't say anything about what type or kind of science they're engaged in, or what their goals are.
I don't think there's any real reason to, if you're familiar with Linux ... Sun would like people to use Solaris, and they have some interesting administration tools, and of course they'll sell you a support contract and might be more "PHB compatible" than many Linux vendors, but I've yet to see any good comparisons.
... but if they can't, except for people who already are familiar and more comfortable with it than they are with Linux, I don't see a major draw.
A while back there were some interesting comparisons of SQL performance on Darwin/Mac OS X versus Linux, under controlled conditions on similar hardware; it would be interesting to see a Sun-AMP versus LAMP comparison, done by some disinterested party, using the same versions of all the same software except for the OS, wherever possible. If Sun could outperform Linux, it would be intriguing
Actually, wouldn't the correct metric term be "arseload"?
That's an Imperial assload; it's only used in Britain. It's equal to 1.24 U.S. assloads.
I believe that you're correct (and Wikipedia agrees with you at the moment, saying "the fully automated solution for decrypting HDDVD/BluRay is yet to be done with this approach"), however I've yet to see a really good explanation of how today's crack actually works. There seems to be a lot of conflicting terminology at work; VUK, "processing key," "media key," etc.
My understanding of AACS, gleaned from Wikipedia and other sources, is as follows: the whole thing begins with several keys. One is a title key, which is generated for each movie (or one pressing of a particular movie), and is actually used to encrypt the video stream. Then, there is a Volume Identifier, which is basically a serial number on each pressed disc, located on a part of the disc which can't be written to by consumer disc writers (just like on DVD discs). The Volume ID and the title key are combined (or hashed); I think this combination of the two is what's being called the "Volume Unique Key" (VUK).
In order to make sure that only approved players can decrypt this whole thing, the VUK is encrypted using a randomly generated, per-title key provided by the AACS people. This key (the one used to encrypt the VUK) is called the Media Key, and it's not provided on the disc in the clear at all. It's provided as part of a "Media Key Block," which is the Media Key, encrypted with all the current player keys (so, it's there several hundred times at least, one for every model of approved player).
On the receiving end, the player reads the disc and extracts the Volume ID, the encrypted VUK (which the AACS documentation refers to as the Encrypted Title Key), and the Media Key Block. It gets the Media Key from the Media Key Block by using its secret Device Key, and then uses the Media Key and the Volume ID to decrypt the Encrypted Title Key, and get the Title Key. And from there, plays the video.
What I don't quite get, though -- and it would be great if anyone could fill me in, here -- is how today's crack fits into this whole scheme. What the crack seems to provide, is a way of producing a VUK for any disk, given the Volume ID, which is transmitted from the drive to the host computer in the clear (and is stored on the disc in the clear). But I don't see how this is possible, since the VUK also depends on the Title Key -- and if you know the Title Key, you're already done.
Anyone want to take a stab at explaining how the whole thing works, in something approaching understandable (or at least consistent, defined) terms? The Wikipedia article is not a lot of help right now.
Are we getting to the point, or will we get there in our lifetimes, where an artist cannot afford to pay attention to, watch, look at, read, etc. any works that are not in the public domain or that carry a free license of some sort? Sort of like where people say we are today with respect to software patents.
We are already there. I know several published authors of poetry and fiction, who intentionally do not read anything else that's even remotely close to their own genre of work, because of the fear that they will internalize it and somehow incorporate it into their own work later on, unwittingly. In their case, their fear is driven less by the possible legal repercussions than of the career / artistic suicide that being labeled as a plagiarist would be; as was the case a while back with that Indian girl who wrote the YA novel that had some suspiciously close passages to other novels, it's possible to make yourself a literary untouchable, without actually violating copyright per se. Sometimes those MFAs can be more vicious than the J.D.'s, particularly where "ethical" lapses are concerned.
This sort of firewalling would be tougher, I'd imagine, for a non-fiction writer, since it's nearly impossible to be a decent historian if you don't keep current on what others in your field are doing; the same is true for other fields. Unless you are writing about a topic specialized enough to be all your own, or you are basically just reporting research that you have done from primary sources, you're going to have to begin with things that others have written, and that brings with it the risk of plagiarism, whether intentional nor not.
I've also read several interviews with well known authors where they report the same thing. I think Steven King might have been one of them; IIRC he said that he doesn't really read much other horror fiction, and when he does, it's only when he's taking a break from his own writing for a while. During the actual creative process, reading anything that might be "inspirational" could be dangerous, since the line between what is acceptable and what is unethical is so grey, and dangerous.
What would you have done to avoid being boned?
Hire more lawyers than the other guy. Or buy him out.
Well if they want to be assholes about it, why not just drop them off of the database completely?
It seems to me that Google is in a good position now to offer a deal to sites; they can either agree to be crawled, and thus end up in a cache for 30 days or whatever, or they can just not end up in the index at all. Their option.
Get rid of the "oh we want to be in the index and get traffic, but not be cached" option, which is basically web sites wanting to have their cake and eat it too.
I think these sites have an inflated opinion of their own relevance to the world. They can sue Google, but Google can effectively remove them from the Internet, at least as far as 70-90% (depending on who's doing the counting) of users are concerned.
Fascinating ... thanks very much for the info. I had no idea that IBM's Haifa Lab was actually Ubique under a different name. I had thought that it seemed like there must be some "missing link" between IBM's Sametime and AIM, so now that makes sense.
I always thought that the idea of the "tour" (basically, a way to browse the web "cooperatively" with a group of people) in Virtual Places was neat; it was one of those technologies that really made it seem as if some metaverse-ish virtual world was right around the corner, in 1994. It never really caught on though, and today, I suspect that many users would find a universal "who else is browsing this page" feature creepy, because they've gotten used to it as a solitary experience.
When I said "public sector," I meant 'the portion of the private sector which is devoted in whole or large part to fulfilling the demands of the public, i.e. governmental, sector; in particular U.S. government contractors.' The field is dominated by a number of well-known and very large players, which compete with each other on one hand, but also seem to have certain gentlemanly agreements on the other. They are, for most intents and purposes, essentially in a grey area somewhere between temp agencies which only serve the government, and wholesale private government agencies.
Most people who haven't been involved in the Federal government don't have any idea how much of the day-to-day operations of the USG is handled by contractors; I can personally assure you that if all the contractors decided not to show up for work one day, the government would literally stop.
One thing you don't hear much about, is what progress, if any, is being made in interfacing electronic systems into biologic ones, and growing biologic circuits. Perhaps our understanding of biological computation and storage simply isn't complete enough to make such a system practical, even if we were able to somehow interface a clump of neurons to the outside world electronically, but it certainly seems like the data storage capacity of biologic systems is far greater (per mass/volume) than anything devised artificially. Although, I suppose it's impossible to equate, since it's not clear how 'compressed' information is, when it's encoded by the mammalian brain as memories.